Ephemeral Art with Tara Bahna-James

In this episode of You And I Make A Thing, my friend Tara and I decided to go into nature and create ephemeral art, something that both of us had never done before. It was quite an open-ended idea and we both struggled a bit before we found the inspiration to guide us. Join us as we discuss how it all unfolded.

 

Links mentioned in this podcast

Tara’s SoundCloud album: My Favorite Things, Sacred and Secular Seasonal Music

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Issa Rae Teaches Creating Outside the Lines on Masterclass

Griffin and Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence by Nick Bantock

The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron

Some of these links are affiliate links and I may earn a small commission from them.

 

Photos

The fallen cypress tree in Golden Gate Park

 

The fallen tree in Westchester NY near the reservoir

 

 

Transcript

Thomas: My guest today is Tara Bahna-James. Hello, Tara.

Tara: Hi, Thomas.

Thomas: How's it going?

Tara: Great. Great. Thanks so much. I'm happy to be here.

Thomas: Yeah, I'm happy that you're here. Tara is a playwright, singer, and performer, educator and essayist. She's co-authored six musicals and her shows and songs have been performed at theaters and festivals across the United States. And [00:01:00] about a year ago, Tara released an album on SoundCloud called My Favorite Things, Sacred and Secular Seasonal Music. And I've listened to it and it's wonderful. It's so beautiful. You have a, you have a beautiful voice, Tara.

Tara: Thank you.

Thomas: Before we get started with You And I Make a Thing, I want to ask you, Tell us about a creative thing that you are making at the moment or something that you're planning to make soon.

Tara:  So right now, I've been spending a lot of time outdoors recently, in all seasons just because, just before the pandemic began, I moved to sort of a more rural area than I was living before. And so there have been actually surprisingly, lots of opportunities to just sort of get out and hike and, so I've been thinking about trees a lot.

So at present, a previous collaborator of mine, Jonathan Portera, who I've, worked with several times on musical season, brilliant composer. He and I have been talking for a long time about beginning a new [00:02:00] work together and we don't know a lot about it, but we know that we're both fascinated with the life cycles of trees and the connections of trees to fungi.

Thomas: Mm-hmm.

Tara: And so I exactly where that's gonna take us.

But I think that's kind the direction that we're going in right now.

Thomas: That's great. That's wonderful. I mean, there's, there's a lot there to study and research and talk about and create from. Trees are like us and they're also very different from us in some ways. And, you know, in the sense that their lifespans can be much, much longer than ours.

And they have these, beautiful connections. You mentioned fungi and many trees have that symbiotic relationship with fungi. The fungi give them nourishment and the trees give the fungi nourishment in a different way in return. It's very [00:03:00] interesting.

Tara: What I'm also, what I'm in particularly fascinated by is that, just like from what I said, from spending time outdoors more often, just the way that wilderness affords you simultaneously a real stillness and also company at the same time. And I'm reading Braiding Sweetgrass right now for the first time and there's this beautiful quote that I just came across. I don't have the book in front of me, so I'm not gonna get it right, I'm sure.

But it was something about how the land recognizes you or knows you even when you don't necessarily recognize yourself. And immediately that resonated for me as something that I feel like I experience, even if I'm in a very new place. There's when I'm out hiking, if it's by myself or with dogs, I always, there's just this, this sort of sense of being recognized and not alone in the world. You know, even when in one's solitude.

And that's [00:04:00] just, that's something that feels, um, it's funny, I wanna say it feels very songful to me. It feels very musical, but that's not quite what I'm getting at because it's actually the stillness and the quiet of those moments that I so love.

But there's, there's something in there I guess, that speaks, that I want to