"Find the pattern, and you'll see the design."
As these these words were uttered by a presenter at Tall Pines Conservancy this spring, my ARTservancy art residency project, "Piecework," was seeded.
As a public humanities artist, my work is inspired by the natural places I move through. The goal, most often, is to create participatory art--to have the human members of land communities engage more deeply with that place, and one another, through shared participation in an art installation, oral history project, or writing activity.
Each acre of land protected through Tall Pines' land trust is a labor of long memory, deep passion, and great love. Not by the few, but the many. Establishing a land trust requires an extraordinary level of collaboration from many, many stakeholders. It is, like quilts themselves, a patchwork of efforts and energies from a great many people, past and present.
Each of the picture quilts, like the land trusts themselves, will be a co-creation, pieced together from the donated work clothes of the people who have put their efforts into protecting this land in perpetuity. They are bespoke, and their design, while inspired by the protectorates themselves, is completely tied to--and limited by--the work (clothes) of those who have contributed so much to the future.
"Piecework" will open at Gallery 224 in Summer 2024.
