ISLE Artist Residency
July 18- August 20, 2023 | Deer Isle, ME, USA
I was accepted to be ISLE Theater's artist in residence for 5 weeks in Deer Isle, ME, USA. The concept of the residency was to make an outdoor installation which would respond and inform the environment of a one hour play, Water, Water Everywhere, written by Aislinn Brophy and based off of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The performance was rehearsed with five actors, along the same time course that I fabricated the installation. I was given housing, a material budget, and a stipend, which would support my creation of the public installation, and any other artwork I wanted to make for my portfolio.
During my stay, I lived with three of the actors (Anna Fitzgerald doubled as the choreographer and director as well) in the main town area, which had a post office, coffee shop, and a small inn. The interesting thing about living and working in Deer Isle, which has a population of 2,000 people, was that one of the directors, Marvin Merritt, is a 12 generation "Deer Isler," meaning that his family's residency there predates the founding of Maine as a state. Marvin and Anna had conducted three plays previous, all conducted in different sites near to Deer Isle. The ethos of ISLE centers around the community, which helps house all of the artists among other things.
My Journey
Responding to Landscape
I started the ISLE residency only 10 days after the Camberwell MA Summer Degree Show ended, which turned out to be a blessing. Although I was exhausted from the show, going straight into art-making again— with the public facing pressure of the deadline for Water, Water, Everywhere's opening— enabled me to evade the 'postpartum depression' many artists often feel after finishing a big project. Instead, I was able to build upon the creative momentum of making and installing GARDEN CRATERS, and expand my interest in the garden to a responsive landscape practice.
One of the first things I learned about Maine was that the area experiences record tide changes. In an area near by, the tide swells and wanes 40 feet in height everyday— the largest daily change in the country. In the particular bay of Deer Isle that I lived in, the tides changed an average of 10 feet everyday, filling and emptying a basin. When it was low tide, the basin was entirely dry, revealing thick, smelly clay mud full of dead shells and rocks. Because it was full of oil, the mud would reflect the sky.
Similar to the immediacy of my back garden in Brockley, I was drawn to dig in the mud basin behind my house in Deer Isle. On July 19th, I hiked into the mudflats to make a drawing responsive to the Maine environment. The sulfuric smell, sinking and suction with each step, sharp shell shards, and fluorescent orange light lead me to drag the mud in repetitive movements, carving a circle with my feet. I titled the resulting artwork Ladder In My Garden.
Hiking into the mudflats behind my housing in Deer Isle. Image courtesy of Riley Conrad.
From top to bottom: 0, 1, and 24 hours after Ladder In My Garden was made.
Although my initial intention with Ladder In My Garden was to respond to the material landscape, my observation, from my porch, of the artwork's disappearance compelled me to research more about Andy Goldsworthy, and his focus on time-based/temporary art. Although I was not able to continue to make more ladders in the mud flats during the residency, due to my larger-scale project commitment, I plan to do more work like this in the future.
Installation Requirements for the Residency
Directors Anna and Marvin's vision for this show was to hire a resident artist to produce an environment rather than hiring a set designer to make a more traditional set. Thus, the requirements of this installation that I was required to do were purposefully very flexible: I needed to make an artwork that would create an environment for the play Water, Water Everywhere to be performed at the WoodenBoat School in Brooklyn, ME, a 25 minute drive from my housing in Deer Isle. Marvin coordinated with owner Jon Wilson to procure a "play space" on the property, consisting of a large pavilion (where the actors performed and audience was seated) and a 1.5 acre field leading up to a shoreline filled with boats.
The donors for my housing in Deer Isle, Mary Taylor and Michael Moncavage, happened to have an extensive workshop in their basement with every power tool and material I could imagine. In addition to their workshop, I developed relationships with the technicians and head of the Wooden boat School, Eric Stockinger, so that I was able to borrow tools as needed and use any of the spare wood used for bespoke boat making. I was able to work in the field and store my materials in the pavilion as needed.
In addition to the installation, part of my contract on the residency required me to make the minimalist props for the set, including crates, chairs, and shelves.
Isle Theater website: https://www.isletheater.org/
First Idea: Tree Migrations
In addition to the mudflats, my drives around Deer Isle and into the neighboring towns sparked in interest in the thousands of fallen trees in the woods next to the roads. In speaking to the locals, I learned that almost all of the fallen trees actually get used for boat making or fire wood in the winter. I wanted to think about how to re-animate some of these fallen trees for my primary art installation for the play. Because of all the fog that sets over Maine in July, I envisioned situating a series of trees upright, and painting them fluorescent pink (like the buoys from the area). Like Ugo Rodinone's Seven Magic Mountains totems, I felt that the grey expanse of Maine would be complemented by a flash of bright color glowing from the fog.
Pictured: The workshop at WoodenBoat. Screenshot from the Isle Theater website.
Sketches and color tester for tree totem idea.
A critical component of this idea was that I would need to cut the large trees into sections that I could remove from the woods on my own, and then re-attach the tree parts together using steel. In this way, the 'reanimation' of the trees required a migratory transformation.
After much searching, I found a 30 foot tree that I liked (and was not completely rotted) in the woods at the WoodenBoat School. I cut the tree into sections that I could lift out of the woods and into my truck, and took them to the field to de-breed of rot and smooth out.
Sectioned and prepared tree in the field next to the pavilion at WoodenBoat.
The 30 foot tree took me 3 days to migrate to the ply space, and it dawned on me that from a health and safety perspective, I was probably going to have to make 5 short totems (6 feet in length each) to install as the environment. However, after making my first totem, I found that the August weather was clearing the fog completely, and that I felt that the Rodinone effect I was going for may not be successful among the vibrant green scenery. At this juncture, I ultimately ended up pivoting to my final idea, OCEAN CRATER.
Final Idea: OCEAN CRATER
Marvin's sister's husband was a fisherman, and I went to visit them to borrow fishing rope to secure the tree totems down. When I got there though, Emily showed me all of this patching netting (old and hole-y netting sold any a reduced price to patch holes in industrial fishing netting). I was intrigued by the discoloration, patchwork design, and weave, and immediately had an idea.
The play (which I was starting to become invested in, as I fabricated while the actors rehearsed) was about a mother of the bride at a wedding, moving between the present and the past where 500 men died at sea on her watch. As playwright Aislinn Brophy describes in the script, the audience is brought to "another world, one that exists in [the Mariner's] mind as a blend between fact and fiction. It is the imagined past, mired in the emotions of the present." In my mind, I likened the audience's experience to being just under the surface of the water, perceiving the 'real world' above with a fictional, distorted lens. The water metaphor was topical given Maine's extensive shoreline at the maritime theme of the play. So, to bridge the large field space (perhaps 1.5 acres) between the audience and the water, I decided I would suspend a large expanse of netting above the grass, like a watery responsive surface. The netting would move in the wind, absorb water from the rain, and frame the water view. After I installed the piece, I wrote the following piece for the audience of the show:
OCEAN CRATER Fabrication and Installation
I laid the netting out over the field to get a sense of its size and where it should sit in the landscape. The first step was to secure a rope along the entire edge of the netting.
Netting laid out in the field. Rope woven into edge of netting.
While prepping the edges, I also mended holes in the netting using nylon and hessian string. In keeping with my interest in responsive artwork, I also cut a hole in the center of the netting and lined it with rope— this hole would act as a sundial of sorts, moving a light circle across the field as the sun moved across the sky. After the netting was entirely prepared, I attached longer ropes to each pointed corner. Finally, I needed to attach the corner ropes to the trees and pavilion, stretching it taut enough to sit way above an observer's head.
In reality, sorting out how to raise up the net took 3 different trial-and-errors. Key to the project was figuring out how to do it by myself. In my first iteration, a few actors actually all helped me hoisted the ropes taut, but this solution proved difficult given their busy schedule and was unadjustable once secured to a tree. Ultimately, I realized that I needed to use tautline hitches, a sailors knot that would tighten, but not loosen.
Installation method:
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Tie each rope around its corresponding tree or pavilion strut.
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Loop the rope tied to the tree through its corresponding corner of the netting and then make a tautline hitch.
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Pull on the rope while sliding the tautline hitch down the rope, pulling the netting slightly off the ground
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Repeat step 3 with each corner rope.
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Repeat steps 3 and 4 so that the ropes pull the netting higher and higher.
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As the netting reaches above head height, use ladder or truck so that you can continue to pull the ropes tighter.
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Continue until the netting is 10 feet above the ground.
Using this method, I could comfortably install the netting to the trees in a few hours. Because I would need to take down the installation briefly for a regatta, I installed OCEAN CRATER, took measurements, and made a blueprint for the final installation for the show:
