Art Camp 2015 Epistle
August 24th, 2015
Hello Friends Camp, Quaker community, and all friends elsewhere!
From Sunday August 16th until Saturday the 22nd, we gathered for Art Camp, an independently conceived artist residency, at Friends Camp in South China, Maine. Our intent was to participate in an exchange in which we gave back to camp through our labor while receiving the space, tools, and time to make artwork in a way that would not be available to us elsewhere. As a group of counselors, former campers, and camp staff, it was important to us that we make this work in this place which has had a tremendous impact on us as artists and as people. Our impetus was a need for work space and a desire to explore the particular way we create work within the Friends Camp community. As we gathered this week it became clear that we were also exploring threshing, gift exchange, and gratitude.
Each day we worshiped, met for business, then worked around camp doing end-of-season cleanup, with the bulk of our time dedicated to a deep clean of the Meetinghouse. The rest of our time was spent balancing individual and collaborative art making, object-based and movement-based making, and time spent in discussion and worship. We adopted the Quaker term threshing in our art making during the week. We used threshing to describe the constant processing of ideas through drawing, writing, dancing, sculpting, etc. in order to then discern which paths to follow. Every day we made a new threshing book to fill and share with each other, carrying them everywhere with us. We supplemented our free work time with programming led by each artist, as well as trips to visit friends and explore outside of camp. We began the week by experimenting with many different media and ways of making, and by the end we focused on individual work and one communal piece.
We delved into the book The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property by Lewis Hyde. While reading out loud to each other, we learned about the gift economy and how it pertains to artists in this age, as well as the spiritual and cultural significance of gift exchange. The ideas in The Gift transformed our practices by bringing intention to our threshing and leading us to create a gift for Friends Camp.
In the Meetinghouse we improved the use of storage space, added table space, cleaned many years of dust and pest residue from every corner, and uncovered forgotten materials and camp history. It was a significant transformation of space in a building that has undergone much use. We were visited briefly by Friends from Virginia who were travelling to see our Meetinghouse and who brought to light its history as a place of worship, particularly for Rufus Jones. We found that acting as stewards of the Meetinghouse brought us to love it even more, especially as Friends Camp’s original place of worship and the place where camp began.
We present to Friends Camp a blanket which we have hand-sewn from various found fabrics. At the end of our stay we left it in the Meetinghouse with an accompanying letter. This blanket is alive. It is made to move around all of camp’s buildings and fields and expand over time as the camp community adds pieces to it. We can sit on it, lay under it, embroider it, add patches and pockets to it, play with it like a parachute, tell stories on it, and care for its upkeep. The making of this blanket is a never-ending labor of gratitude.
We gathered for Art Camp as a kind of experiment, and we found it nourishing, transformative, and empowering. We became practiced in bookbinding, got our hands into some clay, and immersed ourselves in contact improv for a night. Many times we found ourselves in worship as we sewed the blanket. We could see ourselves communicating silently through the images in our threshing books, repeating and borrowing from one another. As a small community we were able to become very intimate with each other’s visual languages so that we could then see how we were transforming one another in mysterious and beautiful ways.
Art Camp 2015 was a success! There were hiccups with scheduling and self-organization but overall we accomplished most of what we planned. One week was short for learning new processes and digging deep into our individual practices, and there was discussion on how Art Camp could grow and improve if it were repeated next year. Could it be longer? Could it involve artists who are new to Friends Camp? Should it be more structured, who will plan it? How can we give back to camp? These are questions we are looking forward to discussing this year.
Our thanks to Nat Shed, Jeff Adelberg, Julie De Sherbinin, and Jack Belyeu for their support.
Love and hugs,
ART CAMP 2015
Maggie Nelson, Isa Bowser, Seb Hilton, Bea Denham, Anna “Ricky” Hendrickson, & Max Heller
Hello Friends Camp, Quaker community, and all friends elsewhere!
From Sunday August 16th until Saturday the 22nd, we gathered for Art Camp, an independently conceived artist residency, at Friends Camp in South China, Maine. Our intent was to participate in an exchange in which we gave back to camp through our labor while receiving the space, tools, and time to make artwork in a way that would not be available to us elsewhere. As a group of counselors, former campers, and camp staff, it was important to us that we make this work in this place which has had a tremendous impact on us as artists and as people. Our impetus was a need for work space and a desire to explore the particular way we create work within the Friends Camp community. As we gathered this week it became clear that we were also exploring threshing, gift exchange, and gratitude.
Each day we worshiped, met for business, then worked around camp doing end-of-season cleanup, with the bulk of our time dedicated to a deep clean of the Meetinghouse. The rest of our time was spent balancing individual and collaborative art making, object-based and movement-based making, and time spent in discussion and worship. We adopted the Quaker term threshing in our art making during the week. We used threshing to describe the constant processing of ideas through drawing, writing, dancing, sculpting, etc. in order to then discern which paths to follow. Every day we made a new threshing book to fill and share with each other, carrying them everywhere with us. We supplemented our free work time with programming led by each artist, as well as trips to visit friends and explore outside of camp. We began the week by experimenting with many different media and ways of making, and by the end we focused on individual work and one communal piece.
We delved into the book The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property by Lewis Hyde. While reading out loud to each other, we learned about the gift economy and how it pertains to artists in this age, as well as the spiritual and cultural significance of gift exchange. The ideas in The Gift transformed our practices by bringing intention to our threshing and leading us to create a gift for Friends Camp.
In the Meetinghouse we improved the use of storage space, added table space, cleaned many years of dust and pest residue from every corner, and uncovered forgotten materials and camp history. It was a significant transformation of space in a building that has undergone much use. We were visited briefly by Friends from Virginia who were travelling to see our Meetinghouse and who brought to light its history as a place of worship, particularly for Rufus Jones. We found that acting as stewards of the Meetinghouse brought us to love it even more, especially as Friends Camp’s original place of worship and the place where camp began.
We present to Friends Camp a blanket which we have hand-sewn from various found fabrics. At the end of our stay we left it in the Meetinghouse with an accompanying letter. This blanket is alive. It is made to move around all of camp’s buildings and fields and expand over time as the camp community adds pieces to it. We can sit on it, lay under it, embroider it, add patches and pockets to it, play with it like a parachute, tell stories on it, and care for its upkeep. The making of this blanket is a never-ending labor of gratitude.
We gathered for Art Camp as a kind of experiment, and we found it nourishing, transformative, and empowering. We became practiced in bookbinding, got our hands into some clay, and immersed ourselves in contact improv for a night. Many times we found ourselves in worship as we sewed the blanket. We could see ourselves communicating silently through the images in our threshing books, repeating and borrowing from one another. As a small community we were able to become very intimate with each other’s visual languages so that we could then see how we were transforming one another in mysterious and beautiful ways.
Art Camp 2015 was a success! There were hiccups with scheduling and self-organization but overall we accomplished most of what we planned. One week was short for learning new processes and digging deep into our individual practices, and there was discussion on how Art Camp could grow and improve if it were repeated next year. Could it be longer? Could it involve artists who are new to Friends Camp? Should it be more structured, who will plan it? How can we give back to camp? These are questions we are looking forward to discussing this year.
Our thanks to Nat Shed, Jeff Adelberg, Julie De Sherbinin, and Jack Belyeu for their support.
Love and hugs,
ART CAMP 2015
Maggie Nelson, Isa Bowser, Seb Hilton, Bea Denham, Anna “Ricky” Hendrickson, & Max Heller