Thin Ice

The lake and pond are frozen over. Long ago, living in Pointe Claire nr Montreal, the St Lawrence seaway used to freeze so deep that trucks could cross. Here, I dare not trust the ice with my weight. At the pressure of a foot, it already begins to creak and crack. The arctic air has really crept in everywhere. The horse-trough has only a dimple of open water on an inch-thick crust of ice, where the continuing trickle still keeps things liquid. How does it happen that moving water can be below zero? Do the horses understand that they can still drink? I took a hammer and made the pool a bit bigger. But I imagine it will freeze back again, incorporating the new iceberglets. The horses have grown hairy winter coats, but they do look cold. Could they be stolid sufferers and I not know it?

Heating this house when it's 10 degs Farhenheit is neither cheap nor easy. It feels like trying to use a summer house in th. e winter. If I had the stable cottage working I might well set up a small warm winter study there, like the polythene tent I once made in the attic in St Marys Crescent.

I'm on emotionally thin ice right now. YB is being suffused and invested with the kind of care that makes a place into a home, just as that same warmth is being withdrawn from Lothersdale, in the wake of my mother's death. Cannon County is not Yorkshire, and yet there are moments of mirror resonance. Struggling to stay warm is to struggle for the very idea of home.

But it is part and parcel of YB that it change seasonally. With the leaves down, the woods are more open, the trees more like writing against the sky. Less welcoming, more sparely beautiful.

A new year

News: The aquasculpture is now submerged after the rain. A few more inches and the lake will overflow into the pond, and the whole system will be recharged. The horses look a bit wet and sad. Berzerker is confused. He wants to come in, but then wants to go out. Truth is that he knows he wants something, but understands that something in simple spatial terms. Really he wants to be stroked, but does not know it. Once successfully stroked, he abandons the inside/outside game. This is my replay of Freud's fort/da game. Religious belief, perhaps, is a similar translation of a desire we cannot articulate/acknowledge into one we can understand. 2009 will be the year of the great leap forward at YB. I have hopes that the funding for the residencies will be forthcoming, and that the collaboration with the Yorkshire Sculpture Park will move forward.

Art Program Proposal

Yellow
Bird Sculpture Park



Place and Time: A Dialogue with Nature
Sculpture Residencies and Exhibition 2009

Proposal
To organize an inaugural exhibition of site-specific sculpture and earth-art at Yellow Bird Sculpture Park in the Summer/Fall of 2009. There would be four month long residencies (two for each of August and September), and 10 awards of $750 for costs involved in preparing and installing individual works selected from maquettes, proposals etc. The resulting exhibition would run for six weeks Oct 1 - Nov 15 2009.

Aim
To establish Yellow Bird as a site for displaying and enjoying outdoor sculpture and earth art, to promote the educational benefits of public art, and to bring local artists into contact with the wider international scene.

Budget
* Residencies [4] @ 1000 + travel (max $600), materials ($400), accom + misc costs $500 [$10000]
* Awards [10] @$750 (travel, materials etc.) [$7500]
* Prizes [3] $$ ($2500, $1500, $1000) [$5000]

Planning and organizational assistance [$5000]
Other costs (incl installation, advertizing and promotion) [$2500]

Total $25000

Collaboration hoped for with Vanderbilt’s Studio Art Department, and Cannon County Arts Center. Financial support tba

Wet dreams

Everywhere cold grey rain - cascading off the gutters, soaking the screened-in porches, turning the horse pasture into a paddy field, spawning fractal rivulets, chasing the horses onto higher ground. Tomorrow, if it lets up, I must see if the lakes have filled again, swallowing the exposed submarine rock sculpture, repairing the effects of the summer drought. I am lucky to be able to welcome the downpour, even as it dampens the spirits. How far can one extend that principle of affirmation? Nietzsche once asked: How well disposed would one have to be to will the eternal return of all things? It is not just passive acceptance of the rough with the smooth, or a recognition of the interconnectedness of all things. It is a capacity to delight even in the ugly and misshapen. But we need to remind ourselves not to be sentimental. Can we not delight in the mosquito's aeronautical skills, and its delicate proboscis, even will its existence, in some sense, while slapping it into oblivion?

The rain pours into the night, turning grey wet into black wet. I think tonight is the night of the longest moon. Will its white glow dissolve in this rain? Or will it nonchalantly swim across the lake, staying as dry as a duck? If you watch very closely, can we see it pull itself up on the far side of the lake, and towel off?

I imagine unending rain. The Flood comes, surrounding the house, gently floating it off its foundations. It bobs like an ark. Grateful horses embark in pairs, joining the deer, the squirrels, the turkeys ... Global warming will have strange often dramatic consequences. Will YB return to being an inland sea, once more supporting coral, as it did 450 million years ago, the fossil evidence still shouting from the limestone slabs? Perhaps not: "The United Nations has found close to a third of the world’s corals have disappeared, and 60 percent are expected to be lost by 2030". We can surely embrace change, but not decay, dissolution, loss of diversity. Art is truly important in galvanizing our creativity, but it would all be in vain if it produced rainbow froth on flat beer, if the earth died even as we celebrated the latest crop of baubles. How can art bring a return to what makes the whole game possible? How can art become e(art)h?

Giving voice to other beings: Santa at Yellow Bird

http://video.aol.com/video-detail/im-dreaming-of-a-white-christmas-xmas/2039833095

with thanks to Joe (the real plumber) Prince

Renewing the Peace Circle

In April 2003 we created a Peace Circle of 21 trees about 65' across, and buried a time-capsule under one of these trees, with many poems and statements and small objects. 'We' had just invaded Iraq. Since then things have not gone well. And some of the trees in the circle have died or almost died. Some have already been replaced, but it would be a good time to take stock, tidy up and replace what needs replacing, perhaps with different species of trees. Can we plant honey locusts, which have huge thorns on both branches and trunk? They seem to thrive in that area, but what sort of message of peace would it send to plant heavily armed trees? There are also oaks, walnuts, cedars in the area. So, I will set aside this coming Sunday afternoon for druidic renewal. And bury a new time capsule sending into the future whatever people send or bring. Perhaps including a front page of a newspaper announcing Obama's election.

Changing a balance

At the back of the house, the new road starts up the hill, then turns left along the old fence. At the elbow, there was a small cutting in the fence. Beyond: broken trees, and brambles, sloping downhill, past prickly pear cactus (!!), to a shady-dell area, with rippling gullies that channel away the rain. It has been neglected for decades. Huge osage orange trees commandeer vast footprints with their multiple carelessly splayed-out prickly limbs. Broken branches everywhere. It was all 'the other side of the fence', the far corner of the old Yellow Bird property. But it suddenly struck me what an enchanting area it would be if I cleaned it up. It is an apron of land that, if given a little care, would create a different gravitational balance to living in the Lodge. Just a little way up the road would no longer be a frontier onto the wild, but transition smoothly to something closer to parkland. (The challenge then - not to just domesticate it in predictable ways.)

I cut through about 50' of fence - a mixture of square roll fencing, and barbed wire. Some of the fence wire had cut deep into growing trees, and had to be clipped off with my amazing fencing pliers, the head of which, with its hooked nose and its hammer face, seems to have evolved about eight different functions. I pulled up two T-posts with Joe's heavily levered red post puller. And I coiled the old fence into a rusty brown roll. How to dispose of it? Even The Recycling Center does not want old wire - I think it jams their machinery. Farmers find a back gully and roll old wire into the next century. But the more I looked at it, the more it seemed like an opportunity rather than a problem. I came to see that it could be the armature of a vine-covered bird sanctuary. If I set this jumble of dead wire and fencing in a back from the path, just under the trees, and planted it in the spring with climbers, (or just left it for nature to invade), it would quickly become a haven for birds, protected by the wire from predators.

Removing the fence was a revelation. Just being able to walk across that divide was a special thrill and I took out some small saplings that had taken root in the old fence line. Establishing continuity between what shortly before had been inside and outside was a visceral experience. I could feel the land smoothing over under my hand as if it were flesh. I spent another couple of hours with my Echo chainsaw, trimming the thorn-festooned eye-spike level branches of the osage orange and the honey locust trees. And dragging the amputees deeper into the woods. Occasionally, there would be a backlash from a cut limb, and my right hand got pricked and torn and brimmed with blood. It felt right that I should be marked in some bright way. I was marching around trimming and tidying the world just as I wanted it. But it should not be an entirely one way process. I tried to leave eloquent shapes where I found them - arched branches, branches that fanned out horizontally. Sometimes I would trim them to look even more elegant or strange. Some of these dead grey trees are inhabited by dryads, with little entrances clearly marked.

I left the whole space ready to be bush-hogged with the tractor. It will reduce to clippings all the brambles that tear at one's clothes. Walking will become a pleasure, not a war. And where the branches were dragged off to - deeper into the woods, further down the hill - will become the new wild. If I have destroyed habitat by clearing the brambles, I have created more thickets a little further afield. And the horses will be able to run around without being torn up.

I just hope being mown down in November is not some sort of fillip for bramble growth in the Spring. If I hear the stubble murmuring "What does not kill me makes me stronger", I will have to reconsider my strategy. Meanwhile, I welcome the prospect of some stunning new spaces.