the hills mend me
I went to my first artist residency (!) last month, spending two and a half weeks in Marquette, Nebraska at a paradox of a place called Art Farm where they burn household trash but will salvage most any tool or material within a hundred mile radius.
quintessential Art Farm: scrap wood stored in an antique folding bed
In exchange for housing and access to myriad studios, supplies, and equipment, residents work on the property for about 12 hours per week. One day all ten of us worked together to lift a steel beam up onto some second-story-height scaffolding. Then the beam needed to go into notches along the barn wall in a spot that was too far from the platform to safely reach with such a heavy object. One of the Art Farm staff had an ingenious idea: we tied ropes on both ends and anchored them around nearby protruding metal so that when three people on the ground on each side pulled down on their rope, the beam was raised and those on the scaffolding could guide it into place.
celebratory photo after the beam was in! ft. yours truly in the corner and a glimpse of the beam, (upper right-ish) primed with white paint, looking rather unassuming after all that
Not all of the work generated such a profound a sense of accomplishment (one day we spent more than an hour either shoving a peg in a hole, removing that peg from a hole, or trying to figure out why the shoving and removing were so difficult.) This hallowed day of the beam was perhaps the most satisfying and intense session because the labor of several days prior (welding, painting, moving scaffolding around) came to fruition and because the task was not possible without a team.
a dye flower planted by a friend last summer in the Art Farm garden
For my own project, I went to this residency to learn the repair technique of plastic welding and make a zine about it. I decided to handmake the zine covers from paper that otherwise would have been burned, so I built a mold and deckle from scrap wood and screen and blended water with food packaging paperboard and discarded drafts from past resident writers. I colored some of the slurry with Rit powder and some of it with dye I made (!) by boiling a bunch of flowers, pictured above.
I attempted the paper in batches, figuring the first round would be sacrificial. And it was, all chunky and brown with blue bits of a Red Bull box poking through like lapis lazuli. But I was still attached to these glorified paper towels because I had made them, carefully lining them up on my desk to dry overnight. Treating the initial batch like a first pancake ended up being especially apt: when I came back in the morning, I discovered that most of the paper had been chewed up by a mouse.
bespoke mouse bedding in the making
So then I learned how to set traps, dispose of dead mice, and deter future intruders by drilling tin sheets over holes in the walls. Buy-one-get-one life skills, I suppose.
There was some grace in the grind though. At one point during the papermaking, I was working outside, listening to music on my phone, which I had put in the bib pocket of my overalls. Without snapping the pocket shut, I bent over a tub of slurry and my phone fell in. An emphatic f*ck! rang in the clearing as my hand shot out, fast, grabbing the phone from where it floated, momentarily, on the water’s surface. As I slipped it out of its case and shook, an indie pop song was still playing. A trickle of hope effervesced in my chest. A humidity notification popped up: foreign matter or water has entered one of the ports—do not charge. I power-walked inside to pour some rice into a mug and nestle the device among the grains. For the rest of the afternoon, I scurried between sheets of paper and waited. And by dinner, the water-drop icon had disappeared.
at the Aurora, NE community garden, among the resplendent free vegetables, but the expression on my face also captures how it felt to keep the phone from a watery demise
A fellow artist showed me how to set type for the on-site Vandercook press so I could print titles on the paper I’d made. It took a lot of tinkering to actually get the print to take—the clamps kept ripping the paper or not catching it at all. Finally I tried feeding the paper farther into the machine, which came with the risk of folding, but my satisfaction with these imperfect results was tremendous. The uneven paper and variation in the printing suited the plastic welding zine’s subtitle, “a tool for the apocalypse.” And I knew, intimately, the journey these covers had taken to come into being. During our work time, I had helped build fires for milk jugs and cereal boxes, and I’d burned the bodies of the mice I’d trapped, a column of dark, sweet smoke stretching skyward from a steel drum.
Some stencil art on the mailbox by a past Art Farm resident reads, “the hills mend me.” A little ironic, given the astounding flatness of Nebraska, but the sentiment feels correct. One night we walked down the road, eight of us scattered across both lanes because no one was coming, to see the meteor showers. I felt pleasantly dizzy from looking up and noticed real awe flickering within me.
Like an epiphany, you cannot force awe into existence. But you can create the conditions for it to emerge. So here’s to your proverbial hills—may they mend you.
In solidarity,
Abby