Lucas says: “When I came back from Land Studio 2022, I sat down for an hour and wrote about all the things that happened that I could remember. One particular cycle of activities struck me as significant - let’s call it the ‘Clay / 3-D model / Seedball project’ (I’m sure others can think of a better name). As I was working in my google doc (as I do), my written documentation of the process started to come out kind of like a poem. At least, it began to divide itself up into short lines, so the form of the text looks a bit poemy. I’ll share it here on the KSCA blog”, along with some photos by me and Angelic Graf.
Harvesting clay from the paddock
Digging it out of the mound
lugging it into the shed
In buckets. Heavy!
Roughing-in the shape of the farm
Refining it
Adding “hills”, “valleys”, “roads”, “dams”, “drains”
then
Vegetation, vegie patches, trees, colour
Admiring our miniature three dimensional copy
of the “real” thing
Taking a moment to breathe
and talk together
Admiring our work.
Then
Gently pouring water into the “top dam”, like a weather god
watching it flow across the modelled landscape
Cheering as our sculpture comes to life
Next
Lifting the edge of the tarp
Turning it all over
The “landscape” returns to raw material
no longer signifying anything except itself:
Clay and soil.
Now
Adding compost
Adding lime
Taking off our shoes, rolling up our jeans
Stomping in it
Stomping-it-in
With music
Laughing, falling over, getting dirty
Picking out the rocks and sticks we sense with our toes
Adding seeds
Vetch pea clover oats and a half dozen more
Adding lime
Dancing-in the mix,
homogenising with our feet
Enjoying the childishness of it.
(Someone recalls Lucille Ball stomping grapes)
And then consolidating the giant lump,
too heavy now
to lift as a whole
Plucking out palm size chunks
Rolled into golf-balls
Laying out an enormous array
Backlit by the soft light
from the door of the shed
Like catering rissoles for a huge party
Like minions of Ai Wei Wei or Anish Kapoor
tasked with creating components of a vast installation
This takes all afternoon
and within the group
Cultures emerge and evolve
Efficiencies on this side
(division of labour between manufacture and delivery)
-versus-
Artisanal practices on that side
(slow and chatty and unconcerned about speed).
*
Until
At 5:37pm precisely
It’s all done.
Then washing our feet in the kiddie pool and preparing for dinner.
*
Next morning
Gathering again
Hatching a plan
Loading up the balls
Carrying them
Two people per bread tray
Strolling down to the paddock
Past the uncanny void where the old fence used to be
*Pausing*
Breathing 5 breaths
And then slowly walking
wherever our legs take us
*In silence*
Throwing, dropping, placing, lobbing our seed balls
in the grass, under trees, on top of cow pats, in the hoof plugs
*In silence*
(Sloshing of gumboots and swishing of raincoats)
And then
like a gift
An apparition
Two horses!
one white one black
prance over the hill
The wet air brings their snorting breath to us.
*
When I finish tossing my seedballs
I YELP!
And stand still
*In silence*
Until all are complete. (Until each of us YELPS!)
Then we clap
Five times, together, from wherever we have ended up.
And it's over.
*
We wander
Casually
Back up to the barn
Chatting again, joking,
Glowing a bit.
*
Really, not much has changed:
We gathered some soil from the land, made some shapes, added organic matter and seeds, made some new shapes, and returned it to the same land.
But we’ve changed a bit.
And our feeling about this paddock has changed.
So that what we did seems to have made this place matter
A bit more
than before.
