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Grace Pooley is an undergraduate Art History major at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Grace was born and raised in Auckland, New Zealand. Outside of University grace runs the student art-collective The Fridge Door Gallery. Graces interests include feminist performance art, poetry and painting.
As a global community we are currently leaving our future up to chance. We are rolling a dice, flipping a coin, and crossing our fingers hoping that the climate crisis won’t come too soon and won’t be too bad. Maybe if the dice gives us doubles sixes, if the coin lands on its side, we might just be okay. No matter how we seek to approach the future and attempt to solve the climate crisis, chance will be involved. But it’s up to us how much power we give to chance. We need to be improving our odds of the possibility of leaving behind a planet that can richly provide for and inhabit future generations and wildlife.
The drum is one of the oldest instruments known to man and it exists in some way in every culture. The Polynesian settlers of Aotearoa arrived on a waka, a traditional Maori canoe. On the waka the drum guides the movement of its rowers creating synched co-operations of individuals to act together as one whole. Born and raised in Aotearoa, the drum has come to symbolize this history, a history of the co-operation and strength of the Maori peoples. Ingenious cultures around the world lived off of the land sustainably for hundreds of years. Many of these cultures have sustainable values imbedded into their stories and ways of life. It is for this reason that as a pakeha (white-New Zealander) I believe our indigenous leaders should be given the drum to guide us to work as whole in adjusting our societies to sustainable lifestyles like those they have been practicing for centuries.
To me the rudder symbolises control and directions. It embodies making thoughtful choices about how we move in the world and how we move into the future. The future can be thought of like a misty ocean, it’s pretty hard to see what’s coming next till you get up close, so you have to be careful and calculated as you steer your way through it, responding calmly to the challenges it presents you.
In many ways, I think the future is shaped by how we choose to write history and who we allow to author it. Who gets to write history and tell stories gets to author the ideologies and values that the next generation reads, watches or listens too. It’s my hope that as conversations of diversity and representation continue to go on, the ink brush, or the microphone, whatever means of authoring history, are passed to a wide range of people with rich stories so that our future values reflect a multitude of ancestries and experiences.
For the able bodied our ears are how we listen to the sounds of the world and the words of others. But listening is about more than our ears, and there are many ways that we can listen. The close reading of texts and of art is one way we can listen just as the careful observation of our planet, her weather, her sea levels and the natural disasters she sends our way ever more regularly is another way we can listen. The immediacy and threat of the climate crisis dominates how my generation (Gen Z) views the future and how we imagine our future will look. Solving the climate crisis necessitates co-operation and thus bridging the hyper polarization of our societies. To do this we need to talk to each other, to listen and listen carefully. I think the ear should be the visual symbol of this necessary process.
