John K Grande Canada
Nature is the Art we are Part of
Materials; air, wood, ecology, life and a little wood and paint
Everything is interconnected. Without nature what are we? We are a part of nature… I have an abiding interest in nature having grown up all over the world *(Sri Lanka, Norway, Canada, Germany, the UK…) I experienced nature in so many places as a constant companion to human culture throughout my life. Nature is a healer… Writing on art leads to writing, for I have always written before and after art… Walking and writing animates, adding a dynamic dimension to writing. You edit as you walk, and you choose as you go… It became a real interest. I gradually built a body of World Walk poems… My precedents are Aristotle, William Blake and many others who realized the mind’s animation in movement. At Mount Tsukuba, we have filmed my World Walk . The texts I make are inspired by Concrete poetry of bp Nichol, and the stream of consciousness of Jack Kerouac…. I do this out of sincere interest, for no other reason. As a child in occupied Berlin, or in Sri Lanka I learned to read reality even if I could not understand the language and it enabled me to understand the cues - visual, sound, symbolic… A text sculpture is part of this project, set in the foresr it is a memory marker!
John K. Grande is a leading figure in the art and ecology field. He has curated five editions of Earth Art at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington, Ontario. His books on art and ecology form some of the groundwork for an art forum. They include Balance: Art and Nature (Black Rose Books, 1994), Art Nature Dialogues: Interviews with Environmental Artists (State University of New York Press, 2007, (www.sunypress.edu), and Dialogues in Diversity: Art from Marginal to Mainstream, Pari Publishing, Italy, 2008 (www.paripublishing.com). He is author of Nils-Udo: sur l’eau (Actes Sud, France, 2015), Bob Verschueren: Ecos de la Memoria (Serratosa, Valencia, Spain, 2017).
John K. Grande co-curated Eco-Art with Peter Selz at the Pori Art Museum in Finland with Robert Smithson, the Harrisons, Brandon Ballengee, Alan Sonfist, Denis Oppenheim and others. The 2014 PanAm Games edition of Earth Art at RBG featured Chris Booth, Pilar Ovalle, Alfio Bonanno, Lance Belanger & Kitty Mykka, and Firman Djamil and the Kunsthalle/Mucsarnok Small Gestures show (2016) featured Antony Gormley, Olafur Eliapson, Gustav Metzger, Pilar Ovale and many others.
John K. Grande’s writing has appeared in Artforum, Arts Review (UK), British Journal of Photography, Arte.Es, CIRCA, Landscape Architecture, Sculpture Magazine, Border Crossings, and he has published his poetry in Germany, Canada, the United States, and Japan.
