Photos by Lydia Daniller
Photographs by Justin Hoover
Because of COVID precautions we divided our Fire Wedding into two parts. One was a private ceremony in at the Earthlab Boulder Creek. The other was at the Sagehen Creek Field Station in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. In both places we vowed to to love, honor and cherish fire as a beloved element, until death brings us closer together forever. We do this to cease fighting fire and instead build better relationships with this element. After our wedding in the Sierras, it rained.
The Earth is sexy. Annie Sprinkle had a sense of that even as a child, skinny-dipping in the glacial lakes of the High Sierra. Beth Stephens felt those same stirrings as a kid growing up in Appalachia, when she straddled bucking horses for rodeos. In 2008, Sprinkle and Stephens made that relationship official—the couple symbolically married the Earth.
“We thought, who needs the rights and protections of marriage? The Earth,” says Stephens, today a professor in the Art department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Their resulting performance piece, “Green Wedding to the Earth,” was equal parts earnest, playful, and avant-garde. Guests were given bags of soil to breathe deeply from during the ceremony. Soprano Emma McNairy performed an operatic striptease. The ceremony kicked off a new environmental movement: ecosexuality.
More on the article here.
Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle collaborative art and activism practice has reached a broad range of audiences through their feature length films Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story (2014) and Water Makes Us Wet: An Ecosexual Adventure(2017). Their performance works, and happenings, have been presented at documenta 14, the Venice Biennale and many other art festivals, galleries and venues across the Earth. Their socially engaged performances have included: Ecosexual Weddings extravaganzas, Sidewalk Sex Clinics, Ecosex Walking Tours, Cuddle sessions and Extreme Kissing. The stories in Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover detail some of their behind-the-scenes adventures while making these projects. Readers from Scotland will be thrilled that the Glasgay! Festival (and the Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow) played a “juicy” part in their love story. Stephens and Sprinkle have been in a relationship, and collaborating, since 2002. The founders of the E.A.R.T.H. Lab at UCSC, describe themselves as, “two ecosexual artists in love, in a relationship with each other as well as with the Sky, Sea, Appalachian Mountains, Lake Kallavasi in Finland, the soil in Austria, the Sun, the Moon, Coal, [their] late dog Bob and current dog Butch, and other nonhuman and human entities.” Although they acknowledge the long-established position framing the Earth as mother, they assert that the Earth can also be a lover. Reconsidering the Earth as a lover, creates a shift in the dynamics of responsibility and mutual respect.
More on the review here.
When: Friday 28th January, 6-8pm
Where: Woodend Gallery, The Crescent, Scarborough, YO11 2DF
Tickets: Tickets on a sliding scale. Click here to get tickets for event.
This screening is in response to the current exhibition, ‘Queen Green’ by Susie Green currently on show at Woodend Gallery. The exhibition was partially inspired by the book ‘Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover‘ by Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens with Jennie Klein.
Who is it for?
The film is aimed at 18+
There will be a small selection of drinks available by donation.
Where will it take place?
The screening will take place within the gallery space at Woodend Creative Space, YO11 2PW. The gallery is fully wheelchair accessible and disabled parking available, for more information about the venue follow this link: https://www.woodendcreative.co.uk
Online version: An online version of the film will be made available for those who are unable to attend the event in person.
About the Exhibition
Queen Green is an exhibition of new works by artist Susie Green inspired by her residency at Dalby Forest in the North Yorks Moors. The exhibition celebrates erotic encounters with nature, and moments of confidence and fragility, growth and decay, lightness and dark. Works on paper and large cut-out mixed forms mounted onto wooden trellis portray powerful, blossoming, shapeshifting bodies.
Queen Green is supported by Crescent Arts, Scarborough Museums Trust, Arts Council England and Forestry England.
Curated by Martha Cattell and John Heffernan
The Earth Lab SF got some great newspaper coverage in December 2021 when a fabulous man about town, staff writer Tony Bravo imbedded with us for three days. Award-winning photographer Lea Suzuki did a photo shoot in Holly Park in the Bernal Hill neighborhood. Tony Bravo managed to credit all the right people and places and we couldn’t have been happier with the piece. Click here to see the whole piece by Tony Bravo.
CNN gave us huge exposure with a really fantastic article about the Ecosex Wedding Project, using many of our great photos by our talented photographer collaborators. People saw and read this piece all around the world. We hope we planted some seeds in some people’s heads, that they can have a wedding to a non human entity they love too. Hoping for lots of copycats. The more love generated for the Earth, the better.
