BEYOND THE FARM…

Amy Thornton pursues her passion for vastly enhanced understanding across difference—and ultimately for planetary and human well being—through full-sensory, embodied research practices, academic pursuits, and work on and with the land. She believes that a multi-sensory approach to understanding will promote healthier lifestyles, communities, and planetary coexistences.

Thornton is a designer, farmer, artist, teacher, and life-long student of the land and the people who work upon it, and works within and from the rural perspective. She is also a doctoral student at the University of Washington, College of Built Environments. Thornton received her Master in Design Studies with Distinction from Harvard University, Graduate School of Design, (2020) and spent a year at Harvard School of Public Health. She graduated from Barnard College, Columbia University with a BA (magna cum laude) in Political Science.

Supporting her full-sensory, embodied approach to solutions for wellbeing, Thornton has obtained certificates in visual sensemaking and Social Presencing Theater with Kelvy Bird with Arawana Hayashi, respectively, through Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Presencing Institute and in astanga (200 hour teacher training) and permaculture design. In 2020, she received two Harvard grants to study food insecurity in New England and create curricula around food security for design students which she, along with two of her colleagues, taught at Harvard, January 2021. Thornton has recently received grants from the Vermont Arts Council & Central Vermont Council on Aging collaborative to develop the Creative Interview art curricula for older Vermonters and from University of Washington College of Built Environments to exhibit her work in Vienna, Austria. Thornton’s work was shown summer, 2022, at Flat 1 (Vienna, Austria) and The Seattle Design Festival (Seattle, Washington).

To live her talk and immerse herself in the rural perspective, Thornton is actively regenerating a large farm in Worcester, Vermont for productivity which will play its part in sequestering carbon, reducing climate miles, and increasing food sovereignty through productive forestry, pasture, and agricultural practices.

BACKGROUND

Thornton was raised by artists and spent her formative years in studios, theaters, galleries, and museums. However, rejecting the instability of the artistic life, Thornton pursued a career dedicated to journalism (ABCNews World News Tonight) and education (homeschooled her children for 10 years in rural Vermont and founded and directed Pacem School, an alternative middle and high school dedicated to peace, arts, community, natural environment and mindfulness). 

Life events disrupted this path leaving Thornton responsible for her three children and four dogs and needing to reinvent her career. Although always a feminist, the gap of power, opportunity, and voice between men and women, particularly for older women and women of color, became sharply apparent and informs all of Thornton’s creative work today. The subtle and not so subtle marginalization of these older women and women of color, especially in liberal academic schools for design and academia in general, while not as much in the more conservative labor trades where women electricians, plumbers, and carpenters are respected and empowered, intrigues Thornton. 

Deeply concerned about anthropogenic planetary destruction, chronic disease, and mental health challenges, Thornton’s (care) design and (service) art promotes human behaviors for and ecological health through full-sensory and experiential reconnection to body, material, natural environment, and other humans. Thornton also farms much of her food, works on regenerative construction, makes her own furniture, climbs, skis, and runs the back country, and volunteers for the Town of Worcester, VT and the Medical Reserve Corps.

RESEARCH_art and design for reconnection and health

Thornton explores the root cause for accelerating anthropogenic environmental destruction, human chronic disease, and the deep divides in the United States which she believes is disconnection to the body, “other,” and the beyond-human arising from the narrowing of human sensory experience through increasing occularcentric, disembodied, screen-based, sedentary, isolating, and sensory-limiting practices in education, work, and everyday life. In order to address this challenge to reconnect, vastly enrich our understanding, and ultimately engage in appropriate care, Thornton believes we must radically alter our methods of learning and communicating.  

Through built investigations, illustration, photography, video, oral narrative, scribing and movement practices, working with and sensing the beyond-human, participatory action research to include beyond-human as participants, and the study of indigenous alternative methods of understanding, Thornton strives to develop alternative methods for connection and understanding. Her work, therefore, challenges the confines of text and the screen-based occularcentric to include a multi-sensory, place-and-body based approach. 

Thornton employs empirical (or field study) design research and analysis. Studying and implementing design and art installations which foster multi-sensory understanding and inspire reconnections, she subsequently observes, documents, collects informal, qualitative, and multi-sensory “data”, and strives to communicate the outcomes through full-sensory experiential presentations which provoke and engage the experiencer’s senses. Supporting her work, Thornton deploys theoretical research based on intersectional feminism, indigenous knowledges, knowledge held by multi-species beings, and a canon of female and intersectional theorists. 

Thornton’s hope is to inspire and encourage reconnections to body, to “other”, and to the beyond human for multi-layered understanding, appropriate care, and ultimately and a more collaborative and healthier world. Her work is situated in the rural environment which has been largely neglected by academia and contemporary art.