here from there
a 1974 pot luck dinner
with a neighbor’s
documentary film
The Shakers
.
many stops
steps in-between
linking Shakers
.
distilled into a
10 minuture presentation
for Williamstown Cultural District
Monday Oct 27, 7-8:30pm
at Images Cinema
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Join me & 2 other artists
for talks & discussion & snacks
Please join Curator Christie Jackson and myself on Saturday October 18th at 2:00pm for a ‘Colorful Conversation’ at Fruitlands Museum, Harvard, MA.
We will discuss the Shakers and the use of color–paints & dyes–had in making these two exhibitions, as well as, view the two exhibitions currently on view at Fruitlands Museum, ‘a good many hands‘ (curated by Jackson) and ‘anything but drab’ (installation by Brece Honeycutt).
Fruitlands Museum, 102 Prospect Hill Road, Harvard, MA. More info HERE
images by Kate Wool
yesterday Composer Kevin Seigfried
led a group of us, singing and walking
up the Shaker Holy Hill at the former
Harvard Shaker site
where songs manifested into mantras
golden trumpets sounded off
gold chains circled stones
alerted to warbling anthems, singing
'A Short Prayer for a Sinking World’
written for an 1849 cholera epidemic
sung now with "no doubting or unbelieving spirit"
this morning reading the new Vitra Design Museum
catalog for 'The Shakers A World in the Making'--
“We must grapple with the difference between ourselves
and others and unmake the distance between within and
without to find solidarity in times of division.” [pg 17]
Thanks to the BASSG for organizing yesterday’s memorable magical
walk with Kevin Seigfried, his singers and community.
convergence
concordance
when worlds
of research
collide
Emily Dickinson
The Shakers
Thomas Merton
Shaker Chair No.7 found next to Dickinson’s bed
and, perhaps, another interpretation of Merton’s
famous statement--
“The peculiar grace of a Shaker chair
is due to the fact that an angel might come and sit on it.”
+ in meetinghouse Miriam Cantor Stone and I explore the relationship between
Merton, Dickinson and The Shakers. Listen to the podcast, here.
[quote from Merton’s introduction to Andrew Deming Andrews’ book, ‘Religion in Wood: A Book of Shaker Furniture']
Visit the Emily Dickinson Museum to view the bedroom and chair. More info HERE!
‘Anything but drab’ opens today at Fruitlands Museum in their historic Shaker Office Building.
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.
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Just as nineteenth century Shakers used contemporary paint manuals and pigments, chrome yellow and Prussian blue, they consulted contemporary dye books: Elijah Bemis’ The Dyer’s Companion (New Haven, CT 1815) and Molony’s Masterpiece on wool, silk and cotton dyeing (Lowell, MA 1837).
Dye recipes fill the pages of a mid-19th century Sister’s book from the Harvard Shaker Community. More colors than one can imagine. Dye books speak of possibilities, tantalizing tints of deep dark indigo, rosy reds of madder, geranium scarlet cochineal, dove grey drab and London brown. Dyeing is science, measuring, mixing and timing. Dyeing is days of preparation: grinding, heating, boiling, dipping and dipping, rinsing and more rinsing and finally drying. Color comes at times fast and at others relentlessly slow, and only revealed when the cloth is completely dry.
Painted in layers of watercolors and inks, crisscrossed like a warp and weft or striated light lines streaming into a room, Honeycutt’s accordion book anything but drab sits on a Prussian blue Shaker work table, recalls a bolt of dyed cloth or an unfolded Shaker map and speaks to the root of accordion, accord. Each fold builds on another, joined in unity and harmony, an accordance. Around the room, Shaker umbrella swifts, reels to wind yarn into balls, constructed by Brethren and used by Sisters, further demonstrate the duality, the equality, the accordance.
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Across from the Shaker Office building on Fruitlands grounds sits the Seasonal Gallery with the exhibition "a good many hands" Shaker Communities Woven through Word, Image and Object curated by Senior Curator Christie Jackson.
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Fruitlands Museum, 102 Prospect Hill Road, Harvard, MA, 01451
Thursday - Sunday, 10am-4pm.
A reading from the newly released
2024 Colour & Poetry:A Symposium VI
Chardin in Suburbia and Greyed
AND
It’s that time of year for the annual
Colour & Poetry: A Symposium VII
Friday March 21 2025 via zoom
Free and Registration HERE
Ruth Siddall / Paul Smith / Vaishali Prazmari / Lavinia Harrington / Lujain Tamer-Mansour/ Jordan Verdes / Liz Rideal / Johny Meghames / Rob Kesseler / Jenny Ihn / Scott Brown / Liz Lawes / Sharon Morris/ Yannis Ziogas / Christine Kirubi / Fiona McLees / Roman Sheppard Dawson / Stella Kajombo / Liz Harrington / Jasmir Creed / Lesley Sharpe / Sara Choudhrey / Lucy Mayes / Brece Honeycutt / Tian Rossana Wong/
At 12:30 EST, my talk “collour scarlet on a stormy day” poems from Prismatic Utopia
note: on the opposite page is the work of Sarah Pettitt
full moon
lunar eclipse
skyward eyes
tonight
filtered acrylic paint
on coffee filters
.
became covers for a
recent coptic-stitch book
.
moons
solar systems
solar flares
imagined skies
[book completed at Suzi Banks Baum ‘Backyard Art Camp’]
The Dandelion's pallid Tube
Astonishes the Grass -
And Winter instantly becomes
An infinite Alas –
The tube uplifts a signal Bud
And then a shouting Flower --
The Proclamation of the Suns
That sepulture is o'er -
Emily Dickinson, 1881
What if the dandelion heralded the same respect as the tulip or dahlia, commanded high prices, and could only be purchased at select nurseries? Would it be more highly regarded if it cost more, rather than arrived on lawns and byways for free? Every year, I am astonished by the number of people that vehemently detest the dandelion and seek to eradicate it by any means necessary.
Our lawn, shall we say, is ‘littered with” dandelions, plantain, violets of all types, and clover, just to name a few. Yet when we moved here 11 years ago, the lawn was a wasteland of pure grass, with nature’s bounty obliterated by the indiscriminate use of herbicides and pesticides. Slowly, we have cultivated a variegated spring crop of wildflowers and now watch the bees and other pollinators relish in them. We take cues from the bees, and happily gather the plants, adding them into our diet, since all four of the plants identified above are edible and provide nourishment.
One should not partake of dandelion wine or greens, make an infusion with the dainty violet flowers, add young plantain leaves to your spring salad or munch a ripe pink clover from the field, if herbicides or pesticides have been applied.
“Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded.”
If one has any doubt about the effects of man and his man-made chemicals on the natural world, the New York Times recently published an analysis of a study done by the IPBES (Intergovernmental Science-Policy on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services; www.ipbes.net) that brings clear evidence to our dire situation:
Thoreau noted in his journal on May 9, 1858, “A dandelion perfectly gone to seed, a complete globe, a system in itself.” Why not, for the good of the globe, let those dandelions grow, feeding the pollinators and yourself, let it go to seed and then rejoice in what grows naturally around you?
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Emily Dicksinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R. W. Franklin (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), pgs. 577-78.
Brad Plumer, “Humans are Speeding Extinction and Altering the Natural World at an ‘UnprecedentedPace,” The New York Times, accessed on 5/9/2019.
Henry David Thoreau, The Journal 1837-1861, (New York; The New York Review of Books, 2009), pg. 495.
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Selected favorite books on foraging, plants and herbs:
Katrina Blair, The Wild Wisdom of Weeds 13 Essential Plants for Human Survival, Chelsea Green Publishing, Vermont, 2014.
Steven Foster and James A. Duke, A Field Guide to Medicinal plants: Eastern/Central North America, Houghton Mifflin Company, New York, 1990.
Euell Gibbons, Staking the Wild Asparagus, David McKay Company, Inc., New York, 1962.
Rosemary Gladstar, Rosemary Gladstar’s Medicinal Herbs: A Beginner’s Guide, Storey Publishing, North Adams, 2012.
NOTE: Elizabeth Kolbert writes about the IPBES report in the most recent New Yorker. Here is a link to the podcast: https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/comment/last-chances
Sunday marks the beginning of ‘Daylight Savings Time.’ DST is an early twentieth century concept supposedly implemented to use electricity more efficiently, to utilize more of the natural light and otherwise encourage more daylight activities; just how it does these things is the subject of some controversy. What most of us would agree on is that it is disruptive.
Thankfully, we are not ‘in the dark’ whilst M is deep into a major home project. For this particular one, involving the complete re-cladding of one portion of our home, power to the house was removed and re-routed from the garage to run back to the house. We still have enough amperage to run the refrigerator, lights, furnace, and our computers but not the clothes dryer and the dehumidifier. Furthermore, we have to monitor what is running and not over-load the new power source; i.e., we turn off some lights and then run the washing machine, but we can’t use the toaster while doing a load of clothes. No big deal.
Our monitoring of lights, heat and electricity has left me pondering methods of yore most likely sparked by my first foray into candle-making a few weeks ago. My friend Jody has dipped thousands of candles, being the former proprietoress of Wax Poetic. She taught me the multi-step process: first, cut the wicks to the same length; attach six wick strands to one piece of wood; dip each group into the warm wax; hang and let dry; and then continue dipping until the desired size. This process is not much different than the one employed by the colonial housewife described by Alice Morse Earle in Home Life in Colonial Days:
“Every thrifty housewife in America saved her penny as in England. The making of the winter’s stock of candles was the special autumnal household duty, and a hard one too, for the great kettles were tiresome and heavy to handle. An early hour found the work well under way. A good fire was started in the kitchen fireplace under two vast kettles, each two feet, perhaps, in diameter, which were hung on trammels from the lug-pole or crane and half filled with boiling water and melted tallow, which had two scaldings and scimmings. At the end of the kitchen or lean-to, two large poles were laid from chair to chair or stool to stool. Across these poles were placed at regular intervals, like the rounds of a ladder, smaller sticks about fifteen or eighteen inches long, called candle-rods. These poles were saved from year to year, either in the garret or up on the kitchen beams.”
Tallow, from “…deer suet, moose fat, bear’s grease…” as well as “…every particle of grease rescued from pot liquor, or fat from meat…” was used to make candles. Beekeepers saved the wax from their hives, for this wax did not smoke as much as tallow. Earle reports that wicks were made from “…spun hemp or tow, or of cotton; from milkweed.” Over the past few weeks, the milkweed pods on our land have been spreading their seeds and their silk-down and have given me pause, for I wondered what would have been done with this resource. Today, in the daylight, I will gather some silk-down and try my hand at spinning wicks to be used for the next batch of candles in my own effort to make light.
Alice Morse Earle, Home Life in Colonial Days, (Grosset & Dunlap, 1898), pgs. 34-35, 38.
This morning, I am loading up my ‘wagon’ and heading over to a nearby colonial town, Monterey, MA. My journey will end at their library where I will install my exhibition, underfoot, at the KNOX Gallery. While in town, I will of course visit the Monterey General Store, as any prudent homesteader would have done; catch up on the latest news and procure some victuals. If invited, I will continue up the hill and pay a visit to the amiable ghosts of Rev. Adonijah Bidwell and his family.
On one of my earlier visits to the Bidwell House, I read Rev. Bidwell’s 1784 death inventory. These probate records are invaluable to the researcher. From these possession lists, one can posit much about a family—their wealth, literacy and social standing.
Of course, we are continuing to look for any probate records and journals tucked in the walls of our colonial home. M’s work on re-cladding sections of our old home has not revealed any particular treasures, other than the frequent walnut stored by a little critter between studs or in the crevasses of crossbeams. Over the past year, I made and stitched many books dyed with materials from our land. Some of these books are yet empty, with lines, awaiting text. Since we cannot find any writings from Taphenese, Abigail, Lucretia, Mary, Sarah, Elizabeth or Elenora (the women of this house), I might just have to write it for them.
Note 1: underfoot is on view from October 31 until November 29 at the KNOX Gallery, Monterey Library, Monterey, MA. Opening reception November 1 from 6-8pm and I will give a brief talk at 6pm. For visiting information, Knox Gallery/Facebook.
Note 2: Recently, I was interviewed about underfoot by Amy DuFault for the Botanical Colors Blog .
‘Make hay while the sun shines’ is apt for many reasons and on many levels. Last week, it felt like summer here with temperatures approaching 90 degrees during the afternoons. And, indeed, hay was being made in the fields. Timely, for this week finds the temperatures lower and the days laced with rain and fog. If farmers cut their hay this week, it would either rot in the field or in the bales over time.
A few weeks ago, while reading the New York Times food section, the following caught my eye, “In Colonial days, New England farmhands pitched hay in the summer sun and slaked their thirst with a concoction called switchel, a mixture of vinegar, water and a sweetener, often molasses.”
I recalled hearing about “ales, beers, wines, ciders and spirits” on the May 1 edition of Fieldstone Common. Marian Pierre-Louis interviewed Corin Hirsch about her book The Forgotten Drinks of Colonial New England: From Flips & Rattle-Skulls to Switchel & Spruce Beer. Hirsch masterfully traces the Colonies’ history through beverages of time, intertwining political events, tavern keeping, customs and recipes. Drinks were seasonal and regional, as with the switchel, which was consumed mainly in Vermont on hot summer days. Vinegar was used in this drink to give it a refreshing, tangy twist, for it was hard to acquire citrus fruits. Recipes may be found in Hirsch’s book, including one for the ‘Flip’, reminiscent of eggnog with a smokey taste and made with “beer, rum, spices and eggs served warmed by plunging a poker from the fire” into the mug. Perhaps on a cold winter’s day, we will try a flip, but this summer, pitchers of switchel will grace our table.
