This is Where We Are, Tipped Towards 002019

11.27.2018, 11:43 am
Filed under: Uncategorized

Our planet continues to move around the sun at a remarkable 67,000 miles per hour. Its season-inducing movement plays out in countless ways across the systems of Earth. As we orbit towards winter solstice on December 21st, Earth’s 23.5 º axial tilt tips the Northern Hemisphere further away from the sun and into its winter months.

In honor of this ongoing change that will bring a conclusion to 002018, we offer one more chance this year to order your own Tilt of the Earth 23.5º Teacup. You can learn more about the cups and order one or more on smudge studio’s website. Thanks to the inspiring home studio set-up of our production collaborators Zachary Fields and Janna Dewan in Portland, Maine, they were produced using 100% solar power (kiln, wheels, lighting etc.).

We are very happy to make the cups available for your efforts to ground and connect daily life with the larger material conditions that shape life on Earth.

Each cup is shipped with a certificate of authenticity of its limited edition and an “instruction” card for invited use.

Finding ways to practice daily life at the scale of the geo/cosmo magnitude is an ecological practice that is becoming more and more vital each day.

Bill McKibben recently wrote in the New Yorker:

“The poorest and most vulnerable will pay the highest price. But already, even in the most affluent areas, many of us hesitate to walk across a grassy meadow because of the proliferation of ticks bearing Lyme disease which have come with the hot weather; we have found ourselves unable to swim off beaches, because jellyfish, which thrive as warming seas kill off other marine life, have taken over the water. The planet’s diameter will remain eight thousand miles, and its surface will still cover two hundred million square miles. But the earth, for humans, has begun to shrink, under our feet and in our minds.”

We appreciate McKibben’s geological scale of thinking. This brilliantly concise paragraph spans the local, global, personal, political, social, human and the non-human — all of which exist within the larger, seemingly indifferent cosmological forces. The geo/cosmo scale out of which we evolved precedes our existence and is far from reliant upon us. What if we hadn’t developed so many life ways that encourage and allow us forget this important empirical fact?

And yet, this is where we are. Drinking tea at the tilt of the earth invites us to re-weave our modern-encultured consciousness back into the cosmos.

The photograph on smudge studio’s winter solstice and 002019 “holiday card” (part of a series that we have been producing for 15 years) was taken inside the Fowler Dune Shack, located in the Provincelands of Cape Cod’s National Seashore, during our September residency, where we worked on our ongoing Turning into the Night project.

In late-November, we had the good fortune to return to the Sleeve House, designed by our friends at actual / office, and take up Turning into the Night from within a space that seems designed for it. The house is sited in a rural setting near the Hudson Valley, where it escapes nearly all urban light. Poised atop small hill, the structure includes expansive windows that channel light from all directions, affording a heightened awareness of the constantly moving sun and moon, and the ever-changing weather conditions. Despite being solar-powered and insulated to the point that air infiltration is practically zero, the Sleeve House is one of the most “porous” buildings we have inhabited. Our awareness of the expansive landscape remained acute even while residing inside the building. Our stay inspired us to renew our commitment to adapt Turning into the Night to the winter season and to continue learning from the consequential, continuous change that is generated by our planet’s movement.