Putting Down New Roots

My anticipation to re-enter my studio is growing. The studio has been gutted, old electrical wires stream in all directions like seaweed underwater, boards pulled from the walls lay with nails protruding. One part of the ceiling remains as a loft space with a raised roof and new windows. The other side is open to the eaves. There’s no insulation, lights, or finish, but I can taste the new space.

Filled Studio, Empty Studio, New Construction - same view.

I have always loved my studio, even at its most crowded, inefficient, and difficult to work with. It’s been my space. A space I can leave messy, where I can leave tools where I want, and only I need to know where to find them. It has always had its own organization, betraying its chaotic outward appearance. It’s been a shapeshifter — tables appearing and disappearing, floor space growing and shrinking, and hooks on the ceiling filling with nettles and mint drying.

But now all that is changing. Nothing inside hints at what has happened over the last sixteen years. What lies ahead is unknown.

When I moved in, I brought my materials with me — old tools, rusted metal, fabrics, and curious debris. I continued to make sculpture, sometimes exploring new themes, but always following a known path. Two months ago I emptied every iota of matter — the process took weeks. But, in another month or two, construction will be over and I will have an empty space, a blank canvas. I want to do something different, something that arrives not from the materials, but from inside my heart. A close friend who came in to see the progress asked about moving stuff back in, imagining the fun I would have arranging the space. I realized I wasn’t thinking about that. I’m not thinking about arranging anything, or moving anything back in. I’m only anticipating the experience of this new state of emptiness and my own creativity. I want to feel the art coming from my own body — stripped bare, and I am looking forward to sitting and feeling the empty studio in silence.

Yet, I know that this space can never be truly empty. I will carry the daily news will me: the dire situation of the unfathomable numbers of people displaced by frightening natural forces and horrendous human-caused tortures — their isolation, desperation, and need for help.

The Way of Peace installed in Lawrence, MA, Linda Hoffman

I am beginning to articulate new questions. What is it that I truly want to add to the world? Does art make the world more comprehensible, tolerable, sharable, beautiful? I’ve lived my life believing this. I am humbled by the enormity of the possibilities and challenges, and at the same time excited to meet this new space, share it, and see how it will influence my art. Planting new seeds in the studio, I'm hoping their tiny root hairs will find fertile ground. 

A is for Art

“A work of art is not a piece of fruit lifted from a tree branch: it is a ripening collaboration of artist, receiver, and world.”
                                                         —Jane Hirshfield

Outdoor sculpture is always collaborative. The placement of the work, the ripples of water, the sunlight, tree bark, wind, and moss, all interact with the art. One Sunday morning in early August, a few weeks before the farm’s outdoor sculpture exhibit opened, I found myself alone — a rare event. I walked down to the studio. Warmed by the sun I decided I would ‘do some art’ outdoors. Working with dried branches from a Harry Lauder Walking Stick plant, a sculpture came together easily and spontaneously, making me doubt its worth. But as I walked past it in the week that followed, experimenting a little more and making a few changes, I decided there was something to it and included it in our outdoor sculpture exhibit.

Sitting in Limbo, Linda Hoffman

Last week, a visitor to the exhibit wrote, “My favorite was Sitting in Limbo. I was looking at it, then the wind began turning it around, and I received the beautiful surprise of the meditator sculpture.” 

Sitting in Limbo, Detail

Inside, at the very center of this labyrinth of branches, sits a small meditating bronze figure. Inside the cacophony of the world, there is quiet. This viewer had her own collaborative experience with the wind and the sculpture. It surprised her — and we all delight when nature reveals something previously unseen. Her note to me was also a sweet surprise. Often artists don’t have any idea how their work is received.

Growing apples is also a collaborative endeavor. Soil, weather, the unique characteristics of a particular tree and the orchardist are all part of the cooperative effort of growing fruit. But applepicking is different than growing apples, and this is where I get into trouble. People come to the orchard to take home organic apples, not to have a transformational experience. In my truest of hearts, I am not an orchardist, but an artist; and I don’t particularly enjoy when people come to the orchard as if it was a supermarket with a commodity to grab and pay for. In fact, it’s best that I am not at the farmstand greeting and selling bags. Most problematic for me is that people have their own ideas about reality. Apples should look a certain way, and they should not have any blemishes. As an orchardist, I know that I could do better at growing our fruit, and I could focus on the varieties that the public most desires. But the work of artists is to show that there are other realities. Something lives behind appearances that the artist struggles to reveal. There are complex tastes inside apples such as Blue Permain, Caville Blanc, and Lyscom. Not all apples need have the delightful crunch and sweetness of a Honey Crisp, though there is no denying it’s a delicious apple.

As apple season closes, I realize how much I miss the epiphanies of the creative process. I miss the opportunity to be transformed by art. Especially when I look under the trees at all the apples knocked off, or tossed down with disdain because of some blemish, Jane Hirshfield’s words articulating the distinction between the collaborative nature of art and the casual singularity of picking an apple tugs at me. It’s something I have struggled with, yet failed to acknowledge. It is tied up with whether I am an artist or an orchardist — because it is hard to do both well.

Right now, however, as I try to make sense sitting inside my labyrinth of thoughts, I dream of the possibility that our small orchard can become a place where there is a ripening collaboration between the picker, the grower, and fruit — Applepicking as Art. 

Eve domesticus

Like many apples throughout history, Eve was discovered by accident. About fifteen years ago, an orchardist at Easton Apples, a large grower in New Zealand, found a tree whose apples were bright red. He considered it to be a promising new cultivar for market. Eve, the apple, has not traveled to this part of the world; she favors the cooler, mountainous regions of Australia and New Zealand. Technically, she is a strain of Braeburn, another New Zealand apple, but there has been some meddling with her DNA, because like some other modern apples, she won’t turn brown when cut.

Eve, the evil one, (or rebel, if you read my blog post Two bad Women and One Good Apple), is now the name of one of the most ordinary apples in the world. Her most distinguishing trait is her bright red skin. In photos, she looks just like a polished Red Delicious apple, the ubiquitous apple of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Following her successful entrance into the apple world, the Heartland Corporation decided to offer a juice made solely of Eve apples. It’s a cloudy, no sugar, pure apple juice, and it had its debut in Malaysia!

This juice is not to be confused with Apple and Eve, the juice from an American family business that started 40 years ago. Apple and Eve was the first juice company to offer organic fruit juice before organics was popular, and the first to offer juice boxes—apple juice stored in a single serving cardboard box, with its own straw and plastic wrap, packaged to travel to the moon.

Artist and inventor, Joe Davis, has been experimenting with ‘apple’ storage in his own unique way. He is using a four-thousand-year old apple variety from Kazakhstan, the birthplace of the apple, Malus sieversii, the parent to our apple, Malus domesticus, to create a new storage system for data. Davis is translating the whole of Wikipedia into the binary code of the four nucleotides of the DNA, then inserting it into an apple using a strain of bacteria that can permeate plant cell walls. He won’t be able to fit all of Wikipedia into one apple, his Tree of Knowledge will be a small orchard.  Indeed, If you bite into one of these apples, you might get more than crunch!

Apples are one of our oldest fruits. In part, their success is due to the apple’s inability to produce offspring similar to its parents. The apple, naturally, practices genetic diversity. New apples do exactly the opposite: their gene pool is limited because the best traits are bred over and over again which is one of the reasons modern apples have lost the ability to ward off pests. We’re getting better at breeding, and creating tasty and disease-resistant varieties, though only time will tell if these changes are permanent, or whether the insects and fungi will breed and outfox us. We are sometimes so focused on creating what is desirable to us, that we neglect what nature would do on its own over time.

The ever present debate remains — how much should we interfere? Apple history demonstrates that for several thousand years she’s done quite well on her own — producing apples, locally grown, adapted to particular environments, the Netherlands, France, Asia, Australia, on almost every continent on the planet.  

My friend, Patrick Hughes, wrote to me after the blog about Eve saying he ended a sermon on sustainability with the following:

            There is one final request I want to leave you with. I believe we need to rewrite the story of Genesis to say that the residents of the Garden of Eden are not cast out of paradise by eating from the tree of knowledge but have it state they gained wisdom and evolved to become the caretakers of the earth by acknowledging this; That apples from that tree of knowledge are locally grown.

We have a few wild apples growing at the farm. After pressing cider, we dispose of the leftover pumice in discreet piles in our wildflower field. Some of the seeds in this leftover mash are hardy enough to send down roots and push up leaves among the wild grasses. Local, sustainable, probably bitter apples, but unique varieties, good for the crows, the bees, and the deer; good for genetic diversity. In my opinion, an apple, better suited for the name, Eve.

Eve domesticus, Watercolor, Linda Hoffman

Correction: In the blog post After Applepicking I misspelled pomologist, Mike Biltonen's name. His newsletter can be found at http://knowyouroots.com/index.html.

A String Workshop

Materials

Pick up a ball of string or rope at the hardware store. Choose one that appeals to you, that resonates with you. It could be nylon and yellow, or natural jute, clothesline, or cotton.

Session One: Introduction

We'll take a seat around the work table with chosen material and begin by asking why we chose this string and not the fifty or so other options.

For example, some strings are quite thin; others are smooth. The one I have in my hand is nylon braided – I can see the tufts at the cut end have frayed, with the outer nylon opening outwards and the finer strands from inside standing up. I didn’t realize at first how many strands there were inside and how the wrapper holds them so tightly together. I wonder if I take it apart further what I will discover.  

There are manila ropes, cotton ropes, polypropylene ropes. Some are twisted; others are braided. What does yours look like? 

Session Two: Finding Your Way

Unravel some of it, play with it, tie it, untie it, loop it, braid it. Then recall that this is the thread of your life. There have been slack times, tightly stretched periods, twisted times, and knots. Sometimes there’s a knot that is so tight you can’t find a way to loosen one of the strands. You give up, leave the knot there, and go on.

Can you call to mind one of these times? A change in your life, the death of someone you love, or even a small knot, such as when you answered too quickly. Can you see that every event is connected to everything else? My own knots are like rosary beads: I know my way by touching them.

Session Three: The Way it is

Read the following poem by William Stafford:

The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it, you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

What has been the dominant thread that you see weaves through your life? How has it supported you? Have you lost it and then found it again? The golden thread throughout my life has always been art. What is yours? What are some of the other strands?

Filling the Vessel, Linda Hoffman,  in process 1999 

Session Four: Your Golden Thread

Share some of your string with another participant. Find a way to weave the two strings together. Do this without speaking. Then talk about what you created with each other.

Source, Linda Hoffman & Margot stage, installed in Worcester

Session Five: Creating a Sculpture

Make loops with your mass of string. Let it fall to the ground. Then pick it up and hang it from the ceiling. We’ll look at everyone’s unique creation.

Then we will clip some of everyone’s string and tie it to our own string mobile.

Notice how in your sculpture your string is still dominant, but the other strings add color and texture, accents, and interest. Your string is the support and your creation is unique.

Session Six: Letting Go

Bring a few objects to our next session to add to your string. Words in wire, sticks, a nail, a shell. Nothing that you are attached to and wouldn't mind losing. Put out on the table all but one of your objects. Walk around and choose a few objects and then add these collected objects to your string mobile. We’ll walk around together noticing how we feel about our chosen items distributed on the other mobiles.

Look at your own piece and share your reaction to it. Does “I don’t like mine” or “I like mine” occur to you? Now, recall that this is your life. Grab and hold and love it. Form it some more. Keep shaping it. You can’t discard it. Keep using it.