Jemila MacEwan, b. 1985 is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in New York. Jemila was born in Scotland before emigrating to Australia with her family, and this sense of displacement has informed her work as a comfortable outsider. In her recent works, MacEwan inhabits the role of various forms of destruction within the natural world—meteorites, volcanoes, fault-lines and glaciers—as a way to reflect on what it means to be human in the age of the Holocene Extinction. MacEwan is a frequent collaborator with other artists, film-makers, performers and dancers. Her work has been exhibited at The Australian Consulate-General (NYC), Pioneer Works (NYC), Victori+MO (NYC), BRIC Media (NYC), The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (NYC), Governors Island Art Fair (NYC), Skaftfell Center for Visual Art (Iceland), and the Gertrude Street Projection Festival (Australia).
Published on February 10th, 2020. Artist responses collected in months previous.
What projects are you working on right now?
I just returned from making the first in a series of acoustic earth works entitled ‘Listening Well’. The piece is a 12-foot parabolic ‘ear’ carved into the earth in a field out in Long Island. I’ll be making the second work in this series at a residency this coming November in upstate New York. Other projects I’m working on take hope from the notion that there is power in honoring ancestors. I think it can be a grounding perspective for accepting planetary transformation and aids the preservation of life as part of a lineage. I’m approaching ancestry as an extension beyond the human in two projects: ‘Mollusk Meditation’ – a guided meditation performance; and ‘Dead Gods’ – a living mycelium sculptural project that attempts to reanimate a long-extinct species of giant fungus.
How do you keep yourself accountable in your practice?
I have a very rigorous and holistic system of goal setting that I’ve developed over the years. It keeps me on track with my larger goals in my art and my life and helps me not get too distracted or bogged down in the petty. I routinely make a large spreadsheet at the beginning of every year with a plan for the following 12 months. From this, I derive monthly lists as the year progresses. Things naturally change so it’s important to not only assess what did or didn’t happen, but to also give yourself credit for everything that happened which wasn’t planned, both good and bad. It’s important that the system is designed in a way that allows me to recognize that I am human and values my professional and personal needs in equal measure.
How do you stay motivated to pursue your creative work?
My work over the past few years has been focused on reckoning with what it means to be human within the Holocene Extinction, which is a very heavy topic to be sitting in every day. It is easy to feel futile as an artist making art about the environment in a world that is in the grips of climate crisis, among other incomprehensibly huge environmental problems. I draw strength from my conviction that we are capable of imaginatively moving forward if we find a way to address the emotional impact environmental crises inflict on our inner lives.
Where do you hope to be 10 years from now and what would you like to say to yourself?
I hope I am making ambitiously scaled work. I’d like to continue making large scale earthworks and films. It’s tough to think about 10 years’ time from now because I am so filled with dread about the state of our environment. I am going to have to get through that fear somehow. I’d like to have a family in some capacity, and I need to consider what that would look like on a planet that feels so imperiled. What would I like to say to myself? I might have a better answer to this question on a different day but today I would say ‘Don’t lose your nerve or your wildness.’
What projects are you working on right now?
I just returned from making the first in a series of acoustic earth works entitled ‘Listening Well’. The piece is a 12-foot parabolic ‘ear’ carved into the earth in a field out in Long Island. I’ll be making the second work in this series at a residency this coming November in upstate New York. Other projects I’m working on take hope from the notion that there is power in honoring ancestors. I think it can be a grounding perspective for accepting planetary transformation and aids the preservation of life as part of a lineage. I’m approaching ancestry as an extension beyond the human in two projects: ‘Mollusk Meditation’ – a guided meditation performance; and ‘Dead Gods’ – a living mycelium sculptural project that attempts to reanimate a long-extinct species of giant fungus.
How do you keep yourself accountable in your practice?
I have a very rigorous and holistic system of goal setting that I’ve developed over the years. It keeps me on track with my larger goals in my art and my life and helps me not get too distracted or bogged down in the petty. I routinely make a large spreadsheet at the beginning of every year with a plan for the following 12 months. From this, I derive monthly lists as the year progresses. Things naturally change so it’s important to not only assess what did or didn’t happen, but to also give yourself credit for everything that happened which wasn’t planned, both good and bad. It’s important that the system is designed in a way that allows me to recognize that I am human and values my professional and personal needs in equal measure.
How do you stay motivated to pursue your creative work?
My work over the past few years has been focused on reckoning with what it means to be human within the Holocene Extinction, which is a very heavy topic to be sitting in every day. It is easy to feel futile as an artist making art about the environment in a world that is in the grips of climate crisis, among other incomprehensibly huge environmental problems. I draw strength from my conviction that we are capable of imaginatively moving forward if we find a way to address the emotional impact environmental crises inflict on our inner lives.
Where do you hope to be 10 years from now and what would you like to say to yourself?
I hope I am making ambitiously scaled work. I’d like to continue making large scale earthworks and films. It’s tough to think about 10 years’ time from now because I am so filled with dread about the state of our environment. I am going to have to get through that fear somehow. I’d like to have a family in some capacity, and I need to consider what that would look like on a planet that feels so imperiled. What would I like to say to myself? I might have a better answer to this question on a different day but today I would say ‘Don’t lose your nerve or your wildness.’
Find Jemila MacEwan on Instagram