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Wild Beauty and the Elemental World

Year: 2026
Type: conference-abstract
Abstract: Journeying through remote wilderness and off-the-map outposts over a span of seven years, Jay Griffiths has explored the complex beauty of the natural world with noteworthy attentiveness, exuberance, and courage, see-king “the will of the wild” and the ways it appears in “elemental vitality, in savage grace.” Organizing her travels around the fourfold of wild earth, wild air, wild fire, wild water—which she splays open in order to add wild ice—Griffiths fraternizes with cannibals; confabulates with gypsies, learns from Amazonian shamans, and wanders the outback with Australian Aborigines. She lies naked, cold and vulnerable in the Arctic snow, hunts magnificent ocean whale, hikes through the heat and desert sands, descends into the darkness of the sea, and disappears into the airy majestic heights of the mountains. Griffiths observes, “What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakable, unforgettable, unshakable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence.” Taking inspiration from these ventures, I plan to focus on and investigate the confluence of the elemental, wildness, and beauty, particularly the aesthetic aspects of their intersection. To gain a better sense of wild and elemental beauty—in contrast to its more domesticated forms—and perhaps even to access “wild being” (Merle-au-Ponty’s l’etre sauvage) and “wild thought” (Lévi-Strauss’ la pensée sauvage), I will draw on examples and share photographs of the elemental world, including deserts (fire) and polar (ice) regions, capricious winds (air), jungles and forests with great biodiversity (earth), the unfathomable sea (water) as well as craggy trees, untamed animals, extreme weather, recalcitrant weeds, natural predation, and unusual insects.
DOI: 10.35469/978-961-7276-26-8_04
Language: English
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W7167813410
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