River Lab

Emotional Healing Meditation with Water

Rebecca Zablocki is a New York born; Connecticut based interdisciplinary artist. She received her BFA from the Hartford Art School in 2014, and is currently pursuing an MFA in the Confluence MFA program, a low-residency interdisciplinary program dedicated to regenerative culture based at the University of New Mexico. She creates work about chronic illness, using fibers and found objects.

Synovium

Season One Artist Highlight: Rebecca Zablocki on Chronic Illness

Elie Porter Trubert is a New Jersey artist who works across a variety of media including sculpture, installation, audio, and photography. She is driven by a deep connection to nature, concern for the environment, and an interest in non-traditional art spaces. She has developed an ongoing contemplative walking practice that involves the creation of ephemeral, site specific sculptural works assembled from gathered natural materials. These pieces allude to impermanence, interconnectedness, and attunement. 

She creates “circle meditations” during her walks and leaves them for human and more-than-human others to find. Ultimately they will be washed or blown away, or changed by natural processes. She documents her ephemeral pieces using photography and video and has been exploring the role of those media in the work. In recognition of her positionality, Elie began a “re-gifting” practice of returning what she had previously taken in an attempt to undo the damage and potential violence of those actions. Going back in time in a sense, she creates work using materials sourced over many years. The resulting pieces are offered back in apology and in an expression of gratitude.

Going forward, in terms of using materials sourced from nature in her work, Elie is developing and internalizing a process and approach for a walking-with practice with the goal of fostering a relationship with the more-than-human that is healing, consensual, and reciprocal.
A long-time nonprofit arts leader, Elie led The Center for Contemporary Art in Bedminster, New Jersey until last year. Her work has been exhibited widely, most recently at Sala752 in Zaczernie, Poland and ASC Gallery in London, England. She has a BA Studio Art from Kenyon College and is an MFA candidate at the University of New Mexico.

Season One Artist Highlight: Elie Porter Trubert on Decolonizing Walking + Ephemeral Sculpture

Natalie Stopka is a Yonkers, New York based artist and educator focused on the material history of color. She captures material and elemental interactions in her collaborative, experimental art practice. Natalie's meticulous, layered imagery incorporates botanical dyes that are ethically foraged or cultivated in her studio garden. The plants provide a seasonally evolving vocabulary of texture and color, rooting her artwork to place. Raised on the south coast of Massachusetts, she earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and MFA from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.

Season One Artist Highlight: The Sensuous Potentiality of Plants with Natalie Stopka

In this new conversation series, Tea Time, Hudson Gardner and Morgan Kulas organically explore what we are encountering, learning, and discovering in our lives. In this episode we ruminate on what healing means to us. From balance, to embodiment, to crossing barbed-wire fences—this is a natural dialogue between new found friends on why it matters to tune into the body's innate intelligence.

On Healing: Tea Time with Hudson and Morgan

John Friedrick is an artist, songwriter and pastor. He serves as the pastor of Oak Street Church in Silverton, OR. John graduated from Oregon State University in 2017 with a BS in Community Development. As an artist and pastor John seeks to cultivate a rich interior life while inviting his friends and neighbors to do the same. Emphasizing love as the central theme of life, while consciously dismantling harmful beliefs within his religious tradition and his own experience. 

John has helped organize community art events in Silverton since 2012 and currently volunteers as an artist in residence at the Borland gallery with the Silverton Art Association. He performs music as Friendmaker and is currently recording an EP of folk songs entitled, Balms. 

John’s art practice is primarily interested in inner and outer landscapes, contemplative spirituality, our relationship and responsibility to the earth, and the importance of accessibility in both spirituality and art. He relies on observation, reflection, and humor in exploring these
topics through plein air paintings and drawings, journal comics, songs, and whatever other medium he happens to be exploring at the moment.

Season One Artist Highlight: Pastoring, Journal Songs, and Meditations on Love with John Friedrick

From the teachings of his Grandfather, Luke Spencer came to know the gifts of nature; its lessons, its care, and its warmth to heal. 

Watching him at a knee-height age in his worn Dickies safety
shoes tending and nurturing the tomatoes, runner beans, and peppers in his greenhouse and running down the garden path with them fresh in a brown paper bag to gift to Nanny for her casserole, Luke experienced the gift of reciprocity; that we can heal and nurture nature, as much as it heals and nurtures us.

It's these affectionate memories Luke comes back to on longs walks along the South Coast of England, where he engages with the sensory experience of being within the world and wild, of being grounded within the present moment to experience the
joy of all beings micro and macro, and to embrace emotion with compassion and loving kindness. 

Through experiencing the difficulties that anxiety can bring within daily life, walking in nature provided a way of inviting these emotions in, to sit with them sheltered by the trees for a while, to respect and honour them, rather than to push them away. Acknowledging like the changing of the seasons their impermanence and embracing their toughness through tenderness.

In his creative practice Luke centres these personal experiences of communing with nature. He looks to engage with our sensory relationship with nature through a curiosity of how mindfulness
approaches, such as somatic dance, and regenerative methods can benefit our health and connection to the Earth. As well as providing a space for difficult emotions such as anxiety to be better understood and eased, and to be given a place for emotions to be heard and healed.

It is this intertwining of science, spirit and story that is present throughout Luke's creativity. Through still and moving image, sound, and installation, he explores how being in nature in the
words of Robin Wall Kimmerer; 

"can be a medicine for our broken relationship with the Earth, a pharmacopeia of healing stories that allows us to imagine a relationship in which people and land are good medicine for each other."

Season One Artist Highlight: Vulnerability, and Collaboration in Photography with Luke Spencer.

The music shared in this track includes:

Nepente by Franz Gordon  
The Transience of Everything by Ave Air

Licensed under a Creative Commons agreement

Eco-Dance Practice for Winter

Sensory Poetics: Receiving a late in life Autism Diagnosis

Join Morgan and Hudson for a casual series on healing with the five elements of Chinese medicine.

Tea Time with Hudson Gardner: on the Water Element

The music shared in this track is by Lotus. 

Licensed under a Creative Commons agreement

Eco-Dance Practice for Spring: Widening in the Dark

The Synovium Podcast is dedicated to fostering bonds between people and the planet through sonic musings on the nature of Embodiment. It is a practice-led research project developed by artist, educator, and scholar Morgan Kulas. Through this work, we lovingly tend to the collective trauma we face as interconnected beings on a planet expressing its wounds. The body is our artistic medium and life-force our material. Through listening, we carefully de-influence ourselves from the systems and stories of control that have separated us from our bodies. Here, we share meditations, experimental movement practices, and interviews with artists who work at the confluence of healing, ecology, and systems change. If you enjoy what you hear, please give us a five star review.

Synovium Podcast

Popular tracks