In this issue, our editors hope to have foraged what is in, and of, the wild. We bask in the abundance of what has been ignored and unleash the dormant art lying within untamed landscapes.
What does rewilding mean - or rather, what does it do? It is an active reclaiming of space, an allowance to embrace that which is unfamiliar and strange. We are breaching barriers of hierarchy, letting structures which no longer suit us shrink in favour of refound appreciation for the untamed. Laying bare on the moss. Being subsumed to the summer breeze as much as the pullings of your own heart. Dismantling the shackles of urban rigidity and letting what has been trampled on grow. The wild extends itself in jaunty trees and weeds. Abundant throughout the outside and the inside. This issue calls back the echoes of ourselves, tied so strongly to the immaterial and physical world around us, to constructs from the chaos of creativity.
We seek to represent what is within the word itself. Our contributors take time to plough backwards in an appreciation for all that has been buried underground. It is an insistent prefix, the ‘re’, a doing again and again which refuses to be forgotten. The ground becomes fertile with uncovered ideas, ideals and identities. We begin to repurpose the wild to make it our own. Using what was there before to build upon, to create from the expanse of material we already have before us, and the breadth of what lies in the wild. Reclaim. Reconnect. Reimagine. To rewild is to renew. To rewild is to return. We look back to the roots of what is ‘wild’ in order to engulf it.
Rewilding is a way to push against systems which no longer suit us. A clawing into the earth, finger nails filled with dirt, to root out ordered oppressions and plant something new. We look to the creations of nature, its embracing of all. The ecosystem of creativity which flourishes in this issue is formed within the layered dynamism of art and words. It is an establishment of the unfamiliar and misplaced over culture and civilisation. Where the latter work through establishing exclusion and boundaries to build and create, the wild is an engulfing of all forces which have been ignored.
Meanings throughout various contexts have taken the wild to mean all sorts. Uncapturable freedom and excitement. A sexual wantonness. Resistance against concreted culture. What grows on the side, out of sight. Something strange. We have poems on wardrobe building, vivid art with drifting dandelions and essays on the callous monster of urban gigantism. Decolonising staircases, biting ice flies queer love and sex. The rewilding in this issue is an unstoppable entanglement of the environment within and around us, in the fullness of all its forms. Whether with tenderness or ferocity, we take the wild and place it back within ourselves.
Whatever Rewilding means to you, we hope you find something new. Something wild. We hope you make this issue your own.
Purchase Issue 4 Rewilding here: https://sinkmagazine.bigcartel.com/product/issue-4-rewilding
Although we rely on these sales as an independent zine, we try to make SINK accessible as possible and have included a variety of pricing options.
Whisk whimsically into our Rewilding playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6Ppibl3wNCiXhRmt0c3PtH?si=G85JVFQYTKO1JYFbCA-aEg
As always, we’re open to suggestions so feel free to pop a message to us on @sink_magazine.