Artist Residency at Eagle Hill School

In the fall of 2024, I took a sabbatical from work to do a 10 week artist residency at a boarding school for kids with learning disabilities in central Massachusetts. Hardwick was ludicrously beautiful in the fall, to an almost surreal extent.

I was excited to have access to the woods after a long time in the city. The remoteness of the town was rather daunting, but it was very peaceful. There were ominous signs in the sky.

I started working in media I was comfortable with, eventually branching out into some experiments that were not as much my forte. I started out with a pincushion (I had forgotten to bring one) and a halloween costume.

I made a black walnut dye/ink out of walnuts I found in the cemetary, and used it to draw a person I saw sleeping on the train, and to overdye some quilt fabric and a couple garments. I dyed and pieced a series of “hilt squares” for a quilt (still in progress) based on the 9 of swords from the Ryder-Waite-Coleman deck.

I was excited to look for mushrooms in the extensive woods around the Quabbin Reservoir; unfortunately, there were drought conditions in Massachusetts for much of my time there, so not excellent conditions for fungi. I did find 5 or 6 interesting or tasty species, however, including an enormous Ganoderma Tsugaue (reishi) which I made into a book.

I also became interested in the prerevolutionary cemetary in town, and created a printmaking/woodworking installation project based on one of the tombstones.
Continued in Part 2!