Our third week in action has been so busy with a big event and residents coming and going; we will have to take this recap one day at a time.
Monday was the big day at the Pentwater Farmers Market, shopping for our dinner party event, A Pleasant Evening. Alex bought cherries from the local Heeg Orchard, and Amanda collected vegetables from the two organic vendors, Vartian Farms and Liberty Farm. We have a great relationship with the couple that run Vartian Farms- they pick up our compost from the studio each week to feed to their chickens, and we love to buy their eggs and bread. This was a great chance to get to know the beautiful family that runs Liberty Family Farm and Bakery, and start another new relationship between locals and our visiting artists. We found out that they host farm-to-table meals and farm tours by donation, and made sure to spread the word to our friends and our dinner party guests.
Monday was the big day at the Pentwater Farmers Market, shopping for our dinner party event, A Pleasant Evening. Alex bought cherries from the local Heeg Orchard, and Amanda collected vegetables from the two organic vendors, Vartian Farms and Liberty Farm. We have a great relationship with the couple that run Vartian Farms- they pick up our compost from the studio each week to feed to their chickens, and we love to buy their eggs and bread. This was a great chance to get to know the beautiful family that runs Liberty Family Farm and Bakery, and start another new relationship between locals and our visiting artists. We found out that they host farm-to-table meals and farm tours by donation, and made sure to spread the word to our friends and our dinner party guests.
With little time to spare, Amanda continued to work on her bowls, glazing and firing and opening the kiln to a few surprises along the way. Working in ceramics is often a guessing game, and at our studio Amanda is trying out different clays and glazes for the first time, and it is exciting to see how well they are working out. She gave everyone a chance to collaborate and try out the glazing process by setting up a station with glazes, brushes, and bisque-fired bowls. Each resident artist painted one of the larger bowls that will be serving bowls for cornbread at the dinner.
Alex got to work on her pie research, and took over the kitchen to make the first pie of her residency, a rhubarb pie with thick criss-cross crust, and berries from our meadow. At dinner we all tried out Amanda's bowls, fresh from the kiln, and filled them to the brims with Alex's pie.
On Tuesday the collaborations continued, as Alex and Natalie pitted six quarts of cherries by hand, and John and Elijah made music together. Elijah has been recording his Meadowtation songs with a field recorder in the meadow as he writes them, and this week he worked on rehearsing the songs for the concert, and playing with re-recording them with more instrumentation. John spent the afternoon making beats on his laptop for Elijah to experiment with, and they had some jam time with Elijah's instruments and looping pedals. After a trip to Pentwater's only art supply store, Ceasar's Pallette, John had new watercolor paper and origami paper to collage and paint with.
In the evening, the group split up, some to see the screening of Fire Walk With Me in Grand Rapids, and the others to check out the Comedy Night in Pentwater. The field trip to Grand Rapids was mostly in honor of Natalie's healthy obsession with the David Lynch TV series, Twin Peaks, and her beautiful screen prints she has made to honor the genius of the show. Fire Walk With Me is the prequel film that Lynch made after the TV series ended, and the dressed-up full-house crowd at the screening showed how many other people share Natalie's fascination.
In the evening, the group split up, some to see the screening of Fire Walk With Me in Grand Rapids, and the others to check out the Comedy Night in Pentwater. The field trip to Grand Rapids was mostly in honor of Natalie's healthy obsession with the David Lynch TV series, Twin Peaks, and her beautiful screen prints she has made to honor the genius of the show. Fire Walk With Me is the prequel film that Lynch made after the TV series ended, and the dressed-up full-house crowd at the screening showed how many other people share Natalie's fascination.
After a late night with John, Amanda was inspired to work in collage too, designing quilt-pattern stars with a wall paper trim from one of our thrift store runs. It is great to have the big room activated in so many ways, as projects are spread out on the tables and floors; these guys are comfortable being hard at work day and night.
Wednesday was the big day, and Amanda and Alex spent most of it in the kitchen, preparing a vegetable stew, gluten-free cornbread, and three cherry pies for A Pleasant Evening. Each resident artist contributed to the event. John made a playlist for dinner, providing just the right ambient sounds from the soundtracks of Twin Peaks to The Sound of Music, and some other songs we smiled at upon recognizing. Natalie worked away at illustrating the lyrics of Elijah's new song, 'This Love', and made four drawings to give to dinner party guests. At each place setting, the guest had one lyric, so that they could connect with the people around them to build the song. Natalie and Elijah will continue to work on this project by mail, and come up with a zine together in the future.
Each place setting also had a post card from Alex's collection of vintage post cards, with a name on it, assigning a seat for each guest. We purposely sat strangers next to each other, dividing up couples and friends between the four tables, so that guests would meet new people and hash new conversation. The post cards had notes written on them from pen pals of the past, and stamps and postmarks from around the world- they proved to spark conversation before the soup was served. As guests lined up in the soup line, we snapped photos of them holding the bowls that they would take home that night, providing Amanda with the only documentation of the thirty bowls she finished while in residence.
The resident artists and admins were spread across the room as well, giving each table a unique arrangement of new friends. Instead of being waited on, dinner guests served themselves from the soup pot, passed the cornbread and butter, and washed their own dish in a dishwashing station. A spirit of generosity and affinity filled our space and we felt that it was a seminal moment for our studio and our relationship with the townspeople.
After everyone had finished dinner, we all picked up chairs and moved outside to watch Elijah play his new songs on the edge of the meadow where he had conceived them. The mood was magical and the crowd was all smiles as Elijah worked through his set. He played guitar, glockenspiel, loops on pedals, and sang, while John joined him with a shaker egg for a few numbers. The Meadowtations lyrics were reminiscent of traveling, longing, and scenes of the meadow in summer. By the last few songs, guests were dancing in the dusk.
Feeling very grateful, we returned in the studio to refill our bowls with Alex's cherry pie. The serving bowls painted by our residents were auctioned off, with the money going towards residency programming. With our showcase over, and our first session residents preparing to leave on Friday, we took the rest of the night off to spend time together, shooting group photos in the meadow and eating a second dessert at the local ice cream joint.
Thursday was the last day in the studio for our session one residents: Amanda, Elijah, John, and Natalie. The studio was busy with cleaning up, finishing and documenting projects, in anticipation of an epic afternoon field trip with Mary. Amanda deconstructed her outdoor pottery studio, Natalie continued her steady practice of drawing, John burned CDs for his box set of Shared Space Studio working mixes, and Elijah finished and installed his patchwork flag in the meadow.
The flag is visible from our parking lot, even from the chairs Elijah often sits in at the front of our building. It announces something to those who are entering the meadow path. Mirroring the contrast of bold colors in the plants surrounding it, the flag hangs like a regal banner, in appreciation of our two crumbling birch trees and the shelf mushrooms holding them up. I am excited to see this flag hanging in the stark wintertime meadow.
While Elijah finished his meadow projects and packed his car to head home to Idaho, Mary took the other residents to our favorite natural wonder in the region, the Silver Lake Dunes. After climbing the steep dune, a long hike took the artists all the way through the dune forest to the Lake Michigan shore. Part of what makes Shared Space such a special place to be is the surrounding landscape of West Michigan. We are always excited to bring a resident artist to the beach or the dunes for the first time, and marvel at our inland ocean. This hardworking crew had a mini-vacation.
Friday was the day we said goodbye to session one residents and said hello to session three residents. Alex, our session two resident, is staying with us another week and gets the opportunity to meet and work with all seven of the other artists. We spent the early part of the day having exit interviews with the departing residents, asking for their feedback and offering our own. Elijah left early morning to go play a show in Chicago on his way home. Amanda installed two of her bowls that had broken bottoms on a stump in the woods; the bowls sing like bells when hit with a twisted ceramic wand. Natalie prepared for her bus ride, leaving us with some of her beautiful prints. John stayed until after dinner, taking time to document all of the paintings and collages he made here. We talked about ways to maintain his practice once returning home, and how the productive energy of a residency can fuel future projects and inspire life changes like quitting a job or setting up a designated painting space at home.
On Friday, our three new residents slowly trickled in, Scotty Slade Wagner arriving at a nearby pick-up point after six days in a canoe, Nick Lally rolling up on his bike that he rode here from Madison WI, and Amber Phelps-Bondaroff joined us early Saturday morning after a grueling road trip from Saskatchewan, Canada. We didn't let them rest for long, because Saturday was an epic field trip day for the whole gang.
Our first stop was lunch at the best dang restaurant in Oceana County- the eatery in the back of La Probadita, a Mexican market in the neighboring town of Hart. We indulged in tacos and sodas before going across the street to our favorite thrift store, Vintage Rose. The next stop was the historical house of our local hero, Swift Lathers. We spent some time reading through copies of the worlds smallest newspaper, Mears Newz, and appreciating the museum's collection of antique domestic appliances. Then we were off again, headed to visit our new friend at Liberty Family Farms. At this haven of animal and plant abundance, our crew discovered a collective enchantment for observing pigs. We watched the handsome swine bathing in mud while Alex collected fresh green tomatoes for a pie.
Our last stop was the grocery store, to stock up for the week. We did all of that and made it home in time to shoot hoops, have a delicious family dinner, and go to Pentwater beach for our first sunset together.
Sunday was another bustling work day at the studio, with new residents settling in and exploring their surroundings. Scotty joined us and our weekly crew of Grand Rapids friends at the beach; he brought a sculpture project to work on, involving a deer carcass he found on his canoe trip and some yarn. Amber and Nick rode bikes into town to check out the Pentwater library and coffee shop. Alex and her trusty assistant Nickey prepared a sweet green tomato pie to serve at the slide talk. This was the third pie creation by Alex this week, in case you are keeping track.
Our fourth slide talk of the series was maybe the best yet. We had a great crowd of returning friends, and excited first-timers. As we explore the towns around us, we are always inviting those we meet to come to the slide talks- the one day of the week when we open to the public and celebrate our residents together. During Alex's talk, she brought up the struggle she has identifying herself as an artist. The Q&A afterwards brought everyone into the conversation about what it means to be an artist. The audience's response left Alex feeling validated and supported in her practice of creating experiences for her loved ones and documenting the lives of her friends. Everyone had a slice of her pie at the intermission, and stayed for Nick's lecture. Nick explained his definition of hacking- a process of learning a system and then changing key elements within that system to make a new experience. With his tech-heavy projects, he is often working with imaging research and he hacks both computer programs and social situations. Everyone in attendance decided that Nick is a genius.
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