The Haystack Mountain School of Crafts is situated in an incredible environment, a rocky outcrop of Deer Isle with abundant life clinging to it: mosses, lichens, ferns and a dense forest of tall, tough pines in every stage of growth and decomposition. And there is the shore, the views of surrounding islands, the tides. I was most fortunate to have been selected to attend the first-ever summer residency, a two-week period in which all 50 residents had access to any of the studios they wanted to use.
On my second day out in the woods, I saw this fungus:
When the Haystack staff gave me permission to install, I knew that their pieces had to be based on it.
While I worked on several other projects, I used one of the wood shop band saws to cut shaped supports, and altered the internal structure of all the existing ear-fungi I’d previously made. I repaired the holes I needed to make with fresh flax beaten at Haystack, and colored three fungi to be installed there.
I placed one on campus, again eavesdropping on dining hall conversations, on a stump with one of the fungi growing from it.
I hauled a (fortunately aluminum) ladder down all the stairs and over the twisting paths, and placed two more pieces high up in trees in the rocky pine woods near the shore. These two were attuned to each other and to the sea.
