Earth in Relation: Embodied Earthworks

with Nance Klehm
SCULPTURE | Non-Credit Only | $100 lab fee
August 10–16, 2025

This weeklong somatic sculpture class will call makers into the ethical and personal reimagining of making with Earth amid great ecological and social change within the dynamic landscape of West Michigan. Daily awareness practices, area field explorations, readings and discussions of ecological texts, and an introduction to scientific methods and material investigations will culminate in individual and collective earthworks. We will engage with readings and recordings by Dark Mountain, Hans Jenny, Rae Atakpa, Suzanne Simard, The Fythyr, CAConrad, and others. Screenings will include works by Regina José Galindo, Nancy Holt, and others. Assignments will invite students to record their solo predawn walks in the landscape, conduct listening exercises in the woods, and participate in labs introducing them to soil science.

Nance Klehm, Free Exposure: 3 holes, 5 heaps, 2018, Hype Objects exhibition at BallRoom Marfa Marfa, TX, photographer: Alex Marks

Nance Klehm (she/they) has been an ecological systems designer, consultant, and agroecological grower for more than three decades. Her approach is centered on instigating change by activating already existent communities, and her work demonstrates her lifelong commitment to redefining the way human populations coexist with plant, animal and fungal systems on this planet. Klehm is internationally respected for her work on land politics and soil heath. Her work has received extensive national and international media coverage and has been mentioned in over 30 books. She is the author of The Soil Keepers: Interviews with practitioners on the ground beneath our feet (2019) and The Ground Rules: a manual to reconnect soil and soul (2016). She currently splits her time between Little Village, a densely packed, diverse urban neighborhood in Chicago, and fifty acres in the Driftless Region, where she runs Chop Wood Carry Water Residency and cultivates and forages medicinal and edible plants, keeps bees and a fruit orchard, raises ducks and native quail, and grows for several indigenous seed banks.