Translation
Our boots in the field
are needed still
and questioned still.
The green morning’s quiet
betraying rates of decline:
common yellowthroat, willow
flycatcher, eastern kingbird.
With the light behind us,
we stand in for what is not
yet accomplished, their
gaze on us having nothing
to do with the work
but also precisely about it.
In soil, in water,
in sun and weather—
cattail, meadow, least
bittern, Virginia rail—
we stay, look,
measure
light extinction,
standing water, open water,
and they ask,
What’s your
right to that?
The thing that fires
the mind and keeps it
smouldering, one’s use
in the world, what’s
your right to that?
At the burn house
we ascertain how fast
it all goes up.
The flush of labour,
one’s facility with the equipment,
the implements and books,
the hi-viz jackets,
the years of calculations:
all these daily things
rivet and alarm, still.
Sometimes we are shoved
out front to describe
what we’ve gathered
before an audience.
Reeds in wind.
Wind at sunrise.
Marsh-nesters, shrub-nesters,
foliage gleaners.
A sandspit extending into
waabishkiigoo gichigami.
Sometimes they stop paying,
but we keep working.
The curve of the earth
discerned from just a few rungs
up the ladder.
Today, in muck
to the kneecaps,
we measured a silence
once filled with
birdsong.
It’s like translation:
the words, the room,
the screen, the darkness,
and you, here, listening.
This is how Amanda Rhodenizer describes her series O’er the Western Hills (the title borrowed from a Homer Watson drawing, her paintings also countering depictions of women in Canadian settlement ad campaigns):
Students, temp workers, teachers and retirees from a range of specialized STEM fields are represented: fire safety, water quality, wetland conservation, contaminated site remediation, regenerative permaculture, as well as ethics and justice, accessibility and outreach, and astrophysics. Despite their many professional accomplishments, the lived experiences and day-to-day reality of these members of the science community remains largely dominated by masculinity, whiteness, hetero-cis-normativity, and other privilege. The exhibition is not intended as a recruitment campaign for Women in STEM, but rather as a collection of portraits of female and non-binary workers sharing their experiences as we collectively advance toward the unknown.
“Translation,” which appears alongside the show, was written from Amanda’s paintings, from conversations with her about her subjects and her goals for the work, from bits of story and detail, the lines “Sometimes they stop paying, / but we keep working” a near-exact quote from one of her subjects.
O’er the Western Hills is now showing at the University of Waterloo Art Gallery. Go here to book an in-person viewing appointment and read the poem in the room with the paintings.