You might not expect to find an artist residency amid the marshland of Georgia’s lowcountry. But housed in a 1960s ranch house situated between the deep tidal waterways of Knox Creek and the Carneghan River, the Thicket Artist Residency has played host to painters, sculptors, ceramicists, and numerous others since opening a little over five years ago.
Even more surprising, the Thicket isn’t a stand-alone arts organization, but part of Canewater Farms, a ten-acre organic outfit operated by husband and wife team, Ansley and Rafe Rivers. Amid quintessential lowcountry live oaks dripping with Spanish moss, artists are encouraged to work on the farm and interact with the crew during their residency. They’re also supplied generous helping of the farm’s fruits and vegetables.
It wouldn’t seem that many artists, a decidedly urban set, would be attracted to such rural surroundings. But it is precisely this change of scene that draws many. For instance, Anna Riley an artist in residence in 2016, went with the intention of finding new materials for her glassworks that she makes from scratch. Interested in investigating the meaning and myth of transparency often symbolized by this substance, Riley’s work utilizes sands from numerous locations containing varied chemical compositions. The minerals present in the coastal sands of Georgia, where the Thicket is located, make for oceanic and opaque works of glass.
Anna Riley’s glasswork. Courtesy of the Artist
In turn, making her work within this particular geography, steeped in history as it is, made an impression on Riley’s larger practice. “The idea of the inseparability between the physical and the social suddenly started to matter to me in a new way,” she says of her experience at the Thicket. One can see this idea in The Softening of Stone, an exhibition of her work at the Museum of Art & Design in New York City that seeks to capture the moment and means of material transformation of one substance to another, somewhat like a tutorial in alchemy.
But the Thicket isn’t the only agrarian residency. In Reedsburg, Wisconsin the Wormfarm Institute fully integrates resident artists into life on the farm. Part of their week is spent sewing seeds, harvesting crops, feeding the chickens, stacking hay bales, and other chores around the farm. The rest is spent in making work in studios housed in one of the farm’s several barns.
Perhaps because these tasks are so far outside most artists’ every day, they often serve as inspiration for new works. For former Wormfarm resident Terrence Campagna, inspiration struck when the farm manager asked him to stack the tomato cages for the winter. What he really meant was for Campagna to nest them into one another, which would make sense from a storage point of view. But, as a practical joke (they were and are still are on friendly terms), Campagna instead stacked them into towers. This joke soon got serious.
“I saw how beautiful the forms were,” Campagna tells me, “and began to devise ways to get taller and taller columns. And I began to envision them placed on hillsides in the nearby landscape where I could stack as a grouping.”
Sky cage traps by Terrence Campagna. Courtesy of the Artist
The end result was Sky Cage Traps, an ethereal installation of columns of varying heights and festooned with eye-catching bric-a-brac like kites, balloons, and car dealership flags meant to lure the sky down to earth. Set against the deep blue expanse of a Wisconsin sky, they look almost like sacrimonial offerings from a long since forgotten religion.
Meanwhile, in Brewster, New York emerging playwrights, composers, and lyricists are creating new works amid the rows of Ryder Farm which is home to the SPACE on Ryder Farm. Founded a little over 8 years ago by Executive Director Emily Simoness, the residency was originally meant to provide artists with space and time to create original works while breathing new life into Ryder Farm that’s been in her family for 223 years.
As the program developed, the connection between art and agriculture grew deeper for Simoness, extending into the esoteric. “The four season life cycle of the farm mirrors the macro multiyear steps of the creative process and the nature of collaboration,” Simoness tells me. Planting, trellicing, watering, and harvesting resembles the conceptualization of an idea, deciding on the genre, writing a draft, and staging a work. As she explains, “there’s an investment in the process that farmers and artists share.” For her, both in the arts and in farming “there really is an engagement of faith, I don’t mean religion, but a belief that whatever I’m invested in will yield something.”
In order to get first-hand experience of this parallel engagement while giving back to the community, residents are asked to spend 2 hours a week helping out around the farm. And as a whole, the residency is very much structured around the community. Artists eat three meals a day together and the selection process is firmly rooted in fostering diversity. The goal, as Simoness puts it, “is to create a dynamic assembly of people.” Whatever measure SPACE is mixing these elements, it seems to be working. SPACE received over 1,000 applications for its residency program last year.
In the end, though these programs sound downright pastoral, one is still left to wonder what the arts really have in common with agriculture. After all, on the face of it, these two modes of production have few points of contact. While the arts are mainly the purview of the urban, agriculture is largely rural. More, the arts’ sense of refinement is countered with agriculture’s association with subsistence. And where art requires a society with leisure time and expendable income, agriculture rarely has anything to do with surplus. In many ways, they are each other’s opposites.
But as antipodes, art and agriculture have bookended cultures throughout human history, as they do ours. As such, they have a great deal to say to one another and everything between them about what sustainable culture looks like.
Words by Lorissa Rinehart
