on precarity

The paradox is that to see clearly, you must learn to see obliquely. You must look ahead and, at the same time, widen your peripheral vision so that it extends not just in great arcs around your head, but over the edge, into the margins where the visible and invisible, dreams and reality, land and water, emptiness and profusion mingle.

-Barbara Hurd, Stirring the Mud1

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Precarity often emerges from fears of scarcity and loss, of materials but also a sense of direction and purpose. When the initial idea to develop a year-long writing residency at the Botanic Garden began to germinate, the themes were primarily focused on climate precarity and how one might write-with a site, exploring the personal responses of the singular perspective of this poet alongside the cacophony of voices of kith and kin that call the garden their own.

A few months have passed, we have celebrated the spring equinox, and as the garden emerges from winter there is another element of precarity to consider - the changing landscape of the University and how this might affect its relationship with(in) the garden. While this new consideration of precarity is at once both immediate and insistent, it intertwines with various other elements that weave together to create the multi-layered topography of the Garden.

Over the coming months, I look forward to teasing out the tendrils of these entangled fibres to discover how the Garden engages in other modes and methods in reconsidering concepts of precarity. These will no doubt shift and inform my own responses as I begin to write-with the Garden. Image: when days disappear, Katie Hart Potapoff, letterpress, 2024. 1 Hurd, Barbara, Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination, 13. Athens, Georgia, The University of Georgia Press: 2008.