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...reflections of my time at the farm...

 

Recently I had the privilege of spending three months as an Artist in Residence at Art Farm Birches Bay, in collaboration with ConstanceARI. The residency was a dream; giving me freedom to observe, test, make, eat, connect and play as I pleased, to find out more about the site and its relevance to my practice. 

 

My heart skipped around the hundred hectare property as the excitement of the Tasmanian summer coincided with this time. I frolicked around the longer days, the warmth of the sun and the synchronised dance of tall grass in the wind. The feeling took me straight back to my childhood explorations of countryside Japan, but with different colours, different sounds and different views. The birds sang new songs and the crunching of the bark felt sharp, foreign but familiar, reminiscing on the almost fifteen years I’ve called Australia home. 

 

Time moved at a different pace at the farm, sometimes it dragged on, sometimes hours passed in seconds, and I thought about the layers of time present; in me, in the buildings, in the gardens, land and soil. The dedication, labour and love, of the countless members of community that reside and pass through this place, to the slow growing moulds or wriggling worms, crucial in the foundations of these ecological cyclical systems. 

 

The simplest of activity often secreted the most complex of my existential questions… unresolved of course, and difficult to articulate precisely, but maybe everyone else can also sense in their body too. 

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getting dolerite from the dolerite pit

I was shown the dolerite pit, where they get their dolerite to use for things like gravel. The section where the top soil, heavy with organic matter, met the mineral-rich dolerite, was very promising as a natural clay. I collected this to play with. 

 

Alone, in the enormous pit on an overcast chilly day, my bare hands prying at the dry earth felt frail, insignificant and invasive. No one watched my actions, only the land. 

 

I can take as much as I want and it will look like I took none. 

 

This soil, the minerals present in it, are the residue of all the things that existed before us. My actions felt insignificant to the history the soil carries. It felt exploitative for me to access this and use it, but then everything we use to construct our lives with is just that.

 

It's overwhelming when you think about it really..

 

I picked up countless crumbling shards of dolerite, in awe of the beauty of this material. Rotating them slowly, I played with the deep metallic sheen glistening and subduing in the light. Gazing into its world, I was sucked in, deep in the pit, crouching, alone, with the vastness of the cascading mounds surrounding me in all directions. The birds flew overhead and the trees rustled a soft warning, checking up on me as big raindrops started tapping on my shoulders. It was getting cold, but I didn't care, I needed to sit here a little longer.

 

The rusty sap from the damp dolerite crumbs left my hands porous and stained.

Porous was my skin to the currents of the world and stained was the lens in which we experience them. 

But I thanked the land that day, for its magic was very humbling. 

It muffled the chaos of our minds and lives, to purely bathe in the simplicity of being in the present moment. 

My existence is small in the scale of things; I felt comfort in this realisation and very much alive. 

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cape gooseberry string

 

There is a great bush of gooseberry that grew up a wall of one of the sheds. I went to collect some to make a gooseberry sugar syrup. Heaps had fallen on the ground so I lifted the bush up to get to them. Hidden under the bush was very exciting stuff; some ready to eat protected by the casing, some infested with insects inside and out and some all decomposed, leaving the outer shells as delicate skeletons. 

 

I carefully picked at the skinless carcasses, collecting the beautiful paper-thin casings. 

The fragile scaffolding fluttered on my palm to my breath and the soft wind. The afternoon sun cast a slight shadow, drawing a map. 

 

I stitched the maps together, slowly, carefully, into a single strand. The maps twirled in space, embodying the countless cyclical structures hidden in places we forget to look. The fragility of such structures, picked up by me, stitched and changed in this way, yet remaining so prevalent, holding the accumulative weight of each gooseberry casing attached atop one another. We live within these systems and they continue when we are gone. We create maps on top of these maps, co-existing, intersecting and influencing. 

 

The string of skeletons now cling to my bedroom wall, swaying every time I open the door. 

 

The sugar syrup was delicious too. 

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workers hands

When hands are covered in soil, it accentuates the fingerprints. 

 

One of the most rewarding things about this residency was the time I spent with all the farmers, volunteers and the community members that make up Art Farm. The more time I spent there, the more evident it became that their individual connections to the farm weaved stories and value into the site. Their layered and collaborative fabric cushioned the ground on which everything is built on.

 

I wanted in on this fabric too, so I started stitching in my own patterns. 

 

Helping out in the community garden was pure joy. I became hyper vigilant to all my senses and loved the physicality; repetitive tasks and being in such close proximity to the ground.

 

the intensity of flavours from each produce I picked,

the subtle murmurs of the soil as it trickled out of my fingers, 

sensing the crispness or denseness of the air each day,

the meandering conversations with farmers, with myself and the plants. 

 

The work in the garden stretches and shortens time. It connects you physically to the soil, the land and ultimately to you. 

 

It is shaped by your action or inaction. It relies on you and sustains you. 

 

The farmers are in on this secret, that’s why they do what they do. 

They feel it and feed it so others can know it too. 

 

Their hands, covered in soil, makes their fingerprints stronger, the grooves so deep it roots into the ground, spreading and sprouting as the produce we pick. 

 

The residency started and ending like a dream, everything connected in between.

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