I am excited and honored to be the 2024 Artist- in-Residence at the Slate Valley Museum in Granville, NY! This residency is an experiment that will allow me to explore how my interdisciplinary Eco-Garden Project series, with community engagement that usually takes place outside in my backyard, in a neighborhood setting, can be successfully translated into a museum venue.
The foundation for this exploration is a mustard “tree” sculpture that I’ll be working on throughout the year in a live Open Studio in the museum’s exhibit area. “Moving Mountains, The Mustard Seed Project” is a meticulous, meditative process that will explore the symbolism of the mustard seed while placing tiny mustard seeds from around the world, one by one, on the branches of a foraged mustard “tree” as a contemplative exercise in how “impossible” goals are achieved – one tiny step (seed) at a time.
As I began working on the proposal and a grant for the project, I found I wanted something more for visitors than to be mere “observers” of my creative process. I wanted to give them the opportunity to experience a parallel creative process of their own. And I wanted a project that would be relevant to the museum’s narrative.
The Slate Valley Museum is not an art museum. It is a museum that tells the history of the slate industry in the region, how it is quarried and the lives and stories of the quarry workers. They have a permanent exhibit, “The Dream and the Reality” chronicling the history of the immigrants who have been coming to the Slate Valley since the 1840s to work in and around the quarries.
As an interdisciplinary artist who uses plants as eco-storytellers, I wondered how I could use plants to tell the stories of those immigrants. I wandered through the Italian section of the museum’s exhibit and got an idea. Tomatoes! What’s more Italian than their renowned tomato sauces Then I moved over to the Irish exhibit and thought of their deep connection with potatoes and the Irish Potato Famine. I could tell their stories through food. Then there’s the Welsh, the Central and Eastern European Jews, and the Slovaks. And there’s the immigrants from Latin America who make up most of today’s quarry workers.
I would dry the produce for each ethnic group and visitors to the museum could string the fruits and vegetables onto beading wire while I tell the history of these plants and their “seed journeys” as they traveled around the world. The finished strands will be hung as a floor-to-ceiling art installation co-created by random visitors who come to a museum expecting to learn about slate and find an artist who tells stories through food.
This is going to be an amazing journey for everyone.
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