Cross-Pollinating Worlds

Eden Imrie: Whenever I think about rural space, especially in the context of residencies, I’m struck by how quickly people become aware of their bodies. The moment you lose Wi-Fi or step away from paved roads, you feel the weather, the ground, the insects, the light. It’s a kind of recalibration that city life rarely demands.

Kate Bowen: And what’s interesting is that many people’s first instinct, especially those coming from urban environments, is to encounter the landscape through the camera. They hold up a phone before they do anything else. I’ve come to see that as an entry point. The photograph becomes a bridge: a way of saying, I can imagine myself here; I can begin a relationship with this place.

Imrie: Yes, that mediation can become a threshold. Through it, people slide into a more embodied engagement. Once they’re kneeling in the creek for a photo or brushing ticks from their ankles, they realize: this environment is acting on me too. Rural space reveals porousness quickly. You encounter your own permeability in ways you can easily ignore in a city.

Bowen: Exactly. Cities emphasize human-to-human interdependence: neighbors, noise, routines, shared systems. Rural environments highlight interdependence with everything non-human. You can’t pretend the land is a backdrop. You’re constantly negotiating terrain, weather, animals, the shifting patterns of a place that existed long before you arrived. And that creates its own social texture.

Imrie: I think that’s an under-acknowledged point: rurality isn’t absence. It has density, but the density is ecological rather than infrastructural. People tend to assume rural life is empty or slow. It’s not. It’s saturated with relationships that have nothing to do with human proximity. You can go days without seeing another person, but never without engaging the living world.

Bowen: And that means human relationships take on a different intentionality. In cities, you can’t escape other people, your proximity is pre-scripted. In rural places you have to actively seek connection, which shifts the emotional stakes. Yet at the same time, you’re in constant, involuntary relationship with land and non-human life. It’s almost an inversion of urban logic.

Imrie: And for artists, that inversion can be clarifying or disorienting. It forces a reevaluation of one’s own position—socially, physically, politically. When you realize you’re not the dominant presence in the environment, a different kind of humility emerges.

Bowen: That humility is essential, especially when thinking about the complexities of fear. People romanticize rural life, but for many queer folks or people of color, those spaces carry real risk. And yet, rural communities also require unexpected forms of cooperation. You might completely disagree with someone, but if a storm takes out the only road, you’re dependent on each other.

Imrie: My experience was the inverse. I grew up among rural lesbians whose queerness was integrated into daily life without spectacle. My queerness didn’t feel fully authentic to me in urban queer spaces—it felt most real in the woods, in relation to land. Only later did I realize that rural queer life isn’t a contradiction; it’s just a different expression of queer belonging.

Bowen: And the internet changed everything. As coverage spread into rural spaces, queer people weren’t as isolated. A queer rural network became visible.

Imrie: Visible—but visibility isn’t always the goal. For many rural queer folks, embodiment and safety matter more than recognition. Queerness is lived, not displayed.

Two lesbians sit at a hidden rural swimming hole, remembered within the local lesbian community as a trusted place for privacy, intimacy, and gathering. (Photo: Eden Imrie)

Bowen: Which complicates the assumption that queer life flourishes only in cities. It flourishes differently, in ways that can be quieter, more relational, sometimes more entwined with the rhythms of land.

Imrie: And that difference matters when thinking about cross-pollination. Too often, institutions parachute culture into rural spaces without understanding the existing ecosystem. They assume rurality is a blank slate. It’s not. It’s a dense, storied, relational environment.

Bowen: And reciprocal work acknowledges that urban and rural spaces need each other. The movement between them (the shifting of attention, density, and context) enriches artists’ practices. It allows for different forms of knowing.

Imrie: Which is why thinking ecologically about cultural practice feels so important. Ecology teaches that no environment is complete on its own. Interdependence creates resilience. That’s as true socially as it is in a watershed.

Bowen: Yes. It suggests that cultural institutions should approach place not as a stage but as an ecosystem, one that shapes, constrains, and supports human activity in complex ways.

Imrie: And if we frame cultural work ecologically, then cross-pollination becomes more than a metaphor. It becomes a method.

Bowen: And perhaps a responsibility.

Imrie: Absolutely. Because whether we’re working in the woods or the city, none of us exists outside of relation.

View of the confluence of the Wisconsin and Mississippi rivers from Pike's Peak State Park in Iowa. (Photo: Kate Bowen)