Craft ACT Artist-in-residence 2014: Bogs and Fens

Bogs and Fens: a rtist-in-residence
Catalogue essay
What word is that?
Bogs, fens and how we understand them
By Rosanna Stevens
Aurally, ‘bog’ isn’t a particularly pleasant
word. It’s squat and round at the front,
monosyllabic, and the end of the
word gets stuck in your throat – ‘bog’.
Perhaps I take this view because in
modern Australia, the term connotes
too many things that are not specifically
the ecology and state of a ‘wet, muddy
ground too soft to support a heavy body’.
‘Bog’ has always existed in my vernacular
as either a figurative or slang term. In
fact, I can’t recall a time where I sat in a
classroom and was taught the gorgeous
factual intricacies of what a bog truly
is, and how it functions. Similarly a ‘fen’
is a monosyllabic term that for too long
escaped me: soft, verdant and feathery
in sound, the word never immediately
summoned marsh or wetland, because
it summoned nothing at all: it’s not
a term we are encouraged to use in
passing conversation, unless perhaps
we visited one recently on one of those
marshland holidays the tourism industry
so commonly capitalises on.
Recently, leading British nature writer
Robert MacFarlane delved into this
change in awareness of environmental
language in The Guardian. In drawing to
the public attention the loss of words
that connote or describe our natural
environment, he discussed the most
recent edition of the Oxford Junior
Dictionary, which has removed a list
of nature-related terms – from acorn
to willow – and replaced them with a
technological lexicon. What does this
loss mean? Are we forgetting how to
see and describe the very thing that
builds us and gives us life?
For bogs and fens, while their exact
meanings slowly eek from the Austral
vernacular, their rich watery bodies lie
patiently, still there, but increasingly
threatened by exactly that which the
Oxford Junior Dictionary has almost
too poetically decided to replace
environmental worlds with: human stuff.
Alpine Sphagnum Bogs and Associated
Fens – those bogs and fens which
specifically populate the ACT region,
as well as outcrops in areas of southern
New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania
– are complex ecosystems which act
as significant habitats for a number of
endemic plant species and threatened
animals. Yet, due to their sporadic and
small geographic distribution, these
Left: Annee Miron, Borrowed Time (detail), 2015, found cardboard and gouache.
Photography: Brent Edwards.
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