Haystack: Board/Board
Prayer Beads for Navigating the Haystack Stairs Day one: Amazing!
Day two: Wow, my calves are sore…what’s going on?
Day five: Let’s see, I have a backpack with a water bottle, coffee cup, sweater, book, sketchbook, hat, extra shoes, bug spray, cell phone, sun glasses, ipod, wallet, meds, swimsuit, towel and sunscreen so I don’t have to go back to the room till bed time.
Day 7: !!! these #*!! stairs!
Day 10: acceptance…love thy enemy…become one with the stairs…count, breathe, count, breathe.
Gotta say, I don’t ALWAYS love the stairs. They are beautiful. They are iconic. They are the spine from which all things Haystack grow…but as I get older and rounder, some days they are an adversary to be conquered. From my board I chose to make prayer beads for coming up and going down the stairs. The board was cut into 4 inch lengths then split with a hatchet, allowing the wood to express some of it’s natural form and color. There are 128 beads, one for each step. From these stairs I have learned: To pace myself. To breathe. To observe and appreciate. To accept help. To plan. To stop when I need to. To look, again.
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| Deck Board Box with Lunch Plates |
When walking through the Haystack campus, I always think of the main staircase as the spine of the school; the backbone with the body of campus around it. When making a piece for this exhibition I wanted to maintain the idea of stairs, the idea of a center, or a core of a place. This box is made from the deck boards of the Haystack Campus. The dishes inside are adorned with different trees from Maine and displayed like a staircase. I like the idea of this box made of deck boards that people have walked on over the past 30 years, is now holding the trees of Maine inside it. This is not something that I can exactly put into words, Haystack is a place where I go and am nourished creatively, idealistically, and technically. In my life, my experiences at Haystack have been the spine of being a craftsman in America. And I hold that dear.
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| Code (detail) |
These stairs let us go places. From the studio to the dining hall to the cabins and back again they are our roads. They are tread incessantly, sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly. They have aged. Now, they have been replaced, and we have repurposed them. I cut them up into cubes and blocks. Their once utilitarian function has been erased. They are like toys now. The cuts I have made reveal the young wood against the old surfaces. My sanding has softened their edges just like time did. Their arrangement into chains create patterns to ponder. They were stairs, but sometimes they were places to sit. We sat together and had a conversation or a cup of coffee. Or we sat alone, down below the cabins, and looked out at the sea and the sky and other islands. There one could think or dream or remember, sitting on the stairs. They were a support for this other kind of activity.
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| 49 Island Views |
The aluminum flashing helped protect the stair carriage on which the treads were laid. I cut this material up into small squares. (One of the strategies I have always taught in my workshops at Haystack is that by cutting materials into smaller pieces, new possibilities of construction and expression are revealed.) As I pieced together ‘Flash Armor’, I saw landscapes and seascapes in/on each little square of aluminum. As I reinterpreted the protective function of the flashing, I decided to share my find with ’49 Island Views’. We live in a beleaguered world that needs new solutions to problems all the time. Haystack is indeed one of those places that nurtures old skills and new visions with which we can engage the world. That is why I love Haystack and am so glad to be part of it.
EPOCH…the beginning of a distinctive period
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| Epoch |
And so it was for me coming to Haystack for the first time in 2000. Nothing in my past equaled the openness and the access to creativity on so many levels. Distractions were by choice instead of necessity. During my first class and before the invasive use of cell phones, a call from my office came into the Haystack office. Stu came to find me and I took the call. Later, he approached me and asked if everything was alright. When I answered that the call was important, but that it was job related, he shared, “If you want, I can make sure these calls do not get through to you.” I continue to value the protection and guardianship of the specific quality of “awayness” offered during sessions. Haystack provides an opportunity to scrutinize, whether about a specific process, or imagination’s freedom from reason. Catalysts come in the form of gifted teachers, thoughtful students, and a setting conducive to contemplation. Look through the studio windows when class is meeting and the student intensity is immediately visible. Participate in a dining room meal and it is obvious that communion as well as food is being devoured. Affiliation with Haystack continues to enrich my life. Enduring friendships peppered with thoughtful insights sustain our reality as community even though we geographically disperse after our gatherings. My entry for the Board/Board exhibition is titled Epoch with special thought given to Sengai Gibon (1750-1837). The many lessons I have learned at Haystack are treasured and I hope they are reflected back into my day to day world.
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| Aha! |
It’s all about the stairs. In a conversation with Edward Larrabee Barnes, the celebrated architect who designed the campus, he told me that deciding upon the central stairway was the moment at which everything became clear. Building on the rugged land was not an easy assignment and he had debated building at the top of the property or at the shoreline. He wanted to fulfill of the school’s needs, the environment’s necessities and his own aesthetic vision. Building neither at the top or the bottom, he instead built on the slope between. The spine from which all paths would emanate was the answer. And now, fifty years later, we are using a part of his vision, a physical part of his vision, to create objects. When I was going through the pile of boards made available for our use, I picked up a chunk of wood and found it was attached to another chunk of wood. It was exactly as you see it, two vertical pieces with a horizontal “shelf”. It seemed to be a sign. Or maybe I’m just lazy. This was my piece of the stairs. Everything else simply fell into place.
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| Table |
My current work, Vestigial Landmarks, is a body of work that explores process, utility and form. This work focuses on the transformation of the Midwest landscape, particularly that of farmlands that have deteriorated due to inactivity and redevelopment. These works are also inspired by the idea of nostalgia, independency/dependency, fossils, barns and grain silos, water towers, roadway billboards and other architectural elements that have interest in mass, volume and gravity that riddle this landscape. While often dilapidated and degenerate, these architectural landmarks continue to endure amongst the contemporary sprawl and it is from these that I pull information of time, history, layers and information of structure and construction to create functional objects. When I began thinking of how to incorporate Haystack (literally) into my work, I immediately drew connections with my current work's infatuation with architecture and Haystack's iconic campus. This piece tries to speak the same language of interior/exterior that Haystack does so well. With this piece, I've allowed an honesty within the construction that articulates form while echoing some of the most prominent architectural moments on Haystack's campus, its repetitive deck boards. It is through this repetition that structural and visual integrity take hold.
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| Haystack Mountains |
The stairways at Haystack extend into space and bridge the buildings and the water. I decided to create a centerpiece for a dinner table and that could contract and extend depending on the table size and that, like the stairs from which it was made, would connect the two ends of the table. The upright wooden shapes refer to the hills around Haystack. Just as your visual perspective changes as you walk around the terrain at Haystack, the relationships of the wooden forms on the centerpiece change as you extend the piece.
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| Blockprint |
I requested several 6"x6" blocks of wood for this exhibition. Before their arrival in my studio I had several ideas about what those blocks might become. The shipment arrived with several pieces, each weathered and worn by years of sun, rain, snow and footsteps. I started sanding the patina off the surface of the blocks and almost immediately a smooth new surface was revealed. As an artist who works primarily with textiles, I was taken with the texture of the wood, the patterning and color variation of the grain and the composition created by the knots in the wood. I chose my favorite block, scanned it and then reproduced as an ink jet print at roughly five times its original size. By scaling-up, I hope to make the elements that I found so beautiful in the sanded wood immediately evident to the viewer. The title of the piece refers to the tradition in textile production of carving designs into wood and then using them as stamps to pattern cloth.
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| Untitled |
Claire Sanford & Charlie Crowley
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| Untitled (detail) |
“I pass myself on the steps to the sea…” This is the first line to a poem I wrote the last time I taught at Haystack. While the poem was never finished, I keep returning to this image of watching myself (or selves) – from age 25 to 52 – retracing my steps up and down the iconic Haystack stairs. These stairs are like the spine of the school and appear to run from the ocean to the sky in a wide and generous path. Bounding up them at the beginning of a new day of teaching or walking slowly down after long and satisfying hours in the studio, they’re like a marvelous conduit of creativity. Having a piece of this “vertebrae” makes me very happy. Well worn and weathered, the sections of boards have become “pedestals” for small sketches referencing the 27-year span of my connection to the school. These small studies include demos from past classes, new bits I’ve been playing with, hollowware, jewelry, wood and a rock; all stuff I have loved to collect and play with. Haystack has always been a wonderful point of return for me. I’ve come as a student, a teacher, a board member, a single girl, a married woman and a mom. And each time I’ve taught or talked or just sat and looked and sketched I come away with something new.
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| Untitled (BB#1-7) |
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| A Connection |
This piece joins two of my long term involvements: weaving and Haystack. Both are essential to my life.
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| Stairs/Stripes (For Marcia) |
In my work, I consistently find myself drawn to the found object, with all its history and inherent character. Often incorporating words (another kind of “found object”) or images, I try to transcend the objects' previous role by stripping it down to its most basic elements, and framing it with careful craftsmanship and clean design. Whether including actual text and found objects, or only subtle references to these sources of inspiration, I hope my work offers the viewer an inside peek at the intrinsic value of the often overlooked. The materials in this brooch were literally underfoot – unnoticed by most – for years. In April, I received a package with pieces of richly-patinated sheet metal flashing with a tarred, gummy back and several short pieces of worn, mossy wood. These, combined with a photo I took of the stairs on my first visit to Haystack in 2000 and an excerpt from a writing exercise led by Stu during my second visit in 2005, comprise the body of the brooch. Its abstracted cabin shape offers views both outward and inward, and is adorned by a delicate lacing of moss. I hope it will bring its owner back to his or her favorite memory of Haystack each time it is worn.
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| Haystack in Winter |
Notice what you notice. When I looked at the small sections of old pieces of wood from the Haystack board walks, I noticed the grey color of the weathered wood. The grey patina reminded me of a cold winter sky. People often wonder what Haystack is like in the winter. Perhaps our imaginations find the contrast between winters stillness and summers jubilations compelling. Like time - the horizon line is always there and always changing.
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| Cabin Interior at Haystack with a Great View and a Killer Bee. |
Haystack has been rewarded with much acclaim for its architecture, but I'd hazard a guess that few of the award granters have actually spent a night in a Haystack cabin. It's sometimes a challenging experience. I've been there in October when the mercury dropped to 17 degrees, but was lucky enough to do so under an electric blanket. When the horizontal rains come, if you've been a bit too trusting of the weather, you might have left your transom window open, and now your bed is wet. It might take an entire two week session to dry, if it ever actually does. The walls between the cabins are made of beautiful diagonally placed pieces of wood, but they are thin, and even if you are lucky enough to score a single cabin, you may be next to another lucky camper in a single cabin, but that other lucky camper may snore, and those beautiful diagonally placed pieces of wood that constitute your wall might as well be a bed sheet draped between the two of you. There are bugs—flying insects and crawling bugs and buzzing bees and biting flies and ay yi yi, get the Off! All that said, sleeping on a simple twin bed with a super-firm mattress in one of those little cabins is one of the most magical things one can ever experience. This diorama made by me and my sweetie Fred, out of boards from the Haystack stairs, is an ode to the cabins at Haystack, and to the dreams that happen there.
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| Axis-Mundi-End-Less-Ness. |
Anyone or anything suspended on the axis between heaven and earth becomes a repository of potential knowledge....
This "columna cerulu" attempts to be a point of connection between the sky and the earth...where the four compass directions meet. At this point travel and correspondence is made between higher and lower realms....and communication from the lower realms may ascend to the higher ones. Blessings from higher realms may descend to lower ones and be "disseminated to all".....”
As we walk the Haystack stairs (and float there above the earth) we (I don't feel at all it can be a stretch to say...) at times.......breathe in...the briefest moment(s)...of quiet transcendence...
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| Haystack Stair Tread Tray. |
These boards have been a fixture at Haystack and have carried people from all over the world. With this exhibition, it’s their turn to move. The Haystack Stair Tread Tray is made from one of the painted edge-boards combined with forged and fabricated steel (angle iron and tubing).