25 at 9,500' -- A Winter Artist's Residency

Breckenridge, Colorado.  9,500 feet above sea level. Deep snow angled against the studio, more white falling from the sky, a swirling winter wonderland.  I've made myself at home in the historic Tin Shop, which was bought and renovated by the town's well endowed Arts/Historic District and is now offered as a cozy guest artist's live/work space.  I was a resident here in 2009 and had the good fortune of being invited back for the month of February.  I am now in the midst of  25+ days to make all the art I can make - and I'm off and running!!

Winter in Breckenridge... snowy Wonderland!!!!

 As always, I've come bearing some notion of my intended projects, but I always allow myself to follow creative tangents as they arise.  It's a bit like tracking an animal through the forest on a winter's day, fun and then fruitless, hopeful and maddening!  Now on my ninth official artist's residency program, I've learned that this is the best time to explore brand new creative ideas and to allow myself to wander into uncharted territory with complete abandon. Since I work in a variety of different media, this can lead to some frantic overwhelm - along with sleepless nights - but I am going with it!!

"Lay Down Your Grief And Kiss The Ground" -- a mixed media piece I created for a traveling exhibit called 'Down the Rabbit Hole'... 

"Earth/Ice Listening" -- Studio installation in progress with encaustic wax, discarded paper towels, charcoal, xerox transfer and pencil drawing.

"Tea Series/Mindfulness" -- work in progress -- discarded tea/bags, Usnea, map, paper towel, beeswax, damar resin, box elder seeds, and ink on paper handmade from old lists, fliers, junk mail.

"Tulugaq/Raven of the North" -- ink, charcoal, and acrylic on tree-free paper

 Along with developing new projects, I've also finished a large commission piece for a buyer who shares my appreciation of raptors and other winged things: Tulugaq/Raven, whose range takes her into the Arctic.  I'm currently working on a second commissioned painting, Falling into Blue, which is a creative exploration of color, feeling, and possibility.  As a friend writes, "the breezy surface pulls you in... and then you fall into the mystery."  To me, blue is the essence of what I found in the very far north - rock and ice, sea and sky - and a reflection of the world that lives inside us all. 

"Northern Nightscape Ice-land Aurora Love", study #7, ink and acrylic on tree-free paper

A pile of my hand made paper in the Tin Shop.  Such pleasure in recycling my To-Do lists into creativity!!

 I'm exploring more ideas about Greenland and the Arctic; about land-earth-ice, climate-environment-ecology, human relationships and how the din of our lives can keep us from hearing feeling seeing knowing.  I also find myself creating simple works of art that are - essentially - a celebration of life and aliveness.  The beautiful miracle of it all, like a love letter to Greenland penciled around the girth of the planet.

I've also discovered a relationship between Breckenridge - this cute snowbound ski town in the high Rockies - and the Arctic: our climate delivers the possibilities of change more swiftly to those places that are either high up, or far up. Altitude vs. latitude.  Here the snow drives fast and hard, while at home in southwest Colorado, drought is the hallmark of the current winter season.  What next??

 For me, I've been invited to go North again this summer, to live and work in Canada's Yukon Territory at the Klondike Institute of Art.  May I discover there an untangled pathway to creating sculpture, installation, painted images, porcelain objects and word-craft that resonate with meaning and reach beyond me into the vastness.  As the poet Mary Oliver has written, "I want to be improbable amd beautiful and afraid of nothing, as if I had wings."  Onward. ~

Canyonlands/Crepuscular

Frozen kettle ponds of melted snow adorn the redrock near home.  Canyonlands National Park, Utah.

Crepuscular means to be active at dawn and dusk, like a bobcat, a puma - a creature of stealth, alert and watchful.  Here in the desert, the dawn of the day and the long finale of twilight are my cherished moments.

I've accepted an invitation to create art in Canyonlands National Park for one solitary winter month. It's currently the off-season and the world rings with silence. Snow has settled like a thin blanket over the redrock and the stillness is absolute.  I am loving it.  My greetings to dawn and dusk are a salutation to earth: thank you. 

This morning I rolled out of bed to walk under the stars before the sun before the ravens before I was really even awake, the frigid-oh-my crackle of ice and frozen desert grass under my boots. Orion overhead, North Six Shooter on the eastern horizon, gaining light.  Here: a spaciousness as wide and deep as my heart, a place called home.

Twilight is the bright, sparkling in-between time, and I understand how comfortable I've become in this.  In transitions of space and seasons, I finally relax into the mystery that threads all of creation together.  I'm reminded that I am - we are- so small and fragile, yet as unbounded as clear luminous light.

To be fragile: Little Auk rides swing in a storm!  India ink and acrylic on paper.

Late night, before bed, I step outside into the darkness to listen to the desert, my ears straining to hear something.  Only this: the sound of my own heartbeat thrumming in my ears. The faint hum of life beneath the noise. The sound of a planet at rest. 

There is a parallel to this open canyon country and the Arctic.  Both speak to me in the same language.  Both describe a prevailing natural rhythm where stars take the place of street lights and the illuminated glare of big box stores. There is a timelessness here that captivates me daily.  I fantasize about never leaving.   

In the act of making art exists this same expansiveness.  Writes Terry Tempest Williams in her book, When Women Were Birds, "Creativity is another form of open space, whose very nature is to disturb, disrupt, and bring us to tenderness."  Yes, I think. YES. 

A dusting of fresh powder near the house, and a brand new day at Canyonlands.

Hush, the world
like the desert dawn draped
in her sweater of white.
In silence
all things are possible. 

-R.Barfoot, December 2013

Canyonlands NP, Utah

A Forest and the Bones of Greenland

"Galaxy", cyanotype print with usnea, wild rose, river pebbles by Rebecca Barfoot

Life is precious, especially against the unforgiving starkness of the Arctic.  My time in Northwest Greenland heightened my awareness of how quietly fleeting our time is here on this little blue globe called home.  As a result, I’m working a bit feverishly these days, trying to get all my art projects born before time runs out.  I know this is foolish and fearful, but still I’m creating in a hyper-inspired (manic?) state, extra-attentive and energized.  

It’s a fertile place, this focused frenzy- but again, as ephemeral as our waking hours and numbered earthbound days. 

Smuggled Arctic seal bones adorn- incongruously- a bed of autumn leaves

I woke at dawn today with these words whispering through the mental haze of early morning: “In Greenland, I found the bones of my self.”  One part dream, one part highly conscious thought? I suspect a higher sense of knowing before the din of the daily begins, and I’m grateful for the mysterious tiding.   Since Greenland, I have felt the stirring of something old and moss covered inside me, moving and morphing yet deeply grounded.  

I can’t say with precision what happened for me internally in the icescape of the Arctic- but something did happen.  As if the cold sharpness of bedrock and glacier ripped me open like a storm running down the middle of my life, then tossed me back to sea to find my own way back to shore and sanity.  

Glacier meets bedrock, NW Greenland

 Back home I’ve taken refuge in the forest, an impossibility in northern Greenland as the high Arctic is a land without cover.  Refuge and revelry then!  The season here in Colorado has matured to a crisp golden autumn.  I’ve loved watching the world change as the aspen and cottonwoods gather themselves up for winter, shedding their leaves, drawing into themselves.  I understand.  

Aspens in full glory at a secret spot in southwest CO

 I’ve seen a bumper sticker floating around Durango lately that reads, “Trees are the answer.” Ah, the poetry of trees.   How they hold up the sky and root us all at once.  I watch the Halloween skeleton trees outside the studio, shifting and sighing in the late fall wind.  Yet how steady and steadfast they are- my own personal icons of small triumph.   

Beyond the poetic is the scientific:  trees give us oxygen, clean our air, filter the soil, and manage to transform greenhouse gases into wood.  No wonder I’m smitten. 

I won’t ask you if you’ve ever hugged a tree, but when was the last time you laid down beneath a canopy of, say, an enormous live oak- to be cradled by the forest floor, branches and leaves twining above and the open sky beyond? (Now’s your time!  Autumn is perfect!)  The pungent dirt-smell of moist leaves returning to the earth delivers me to a mysterious yet familiar place of yearning. 

A winter live oak thrives in west Texas

Dirt, moss, bones- and those words carved into my mind from this morning.  Greenland is littered with the skeletons of marine mammals that became Inuit food, and also from the natural course of things.  Nothing breaks down- or hides- with any ease this far north.  Bones are so rich in metaphor that they’ve already found their way into my art.  A year ago in the Adirondacks I began working on a series of coil-built skeletal objects in porcelain, beginning as a group of Lilliputian chairs (to be hung on the wall, a slightly twisted testament to comfort that can never be attained). Then I made some small boats, in the same manner and material.  A little bereft, these unmoored ships that can’t bear their own weight on water, slowly sinking.  Elegant and terrible as unprecedented Arctic ice melt.

"Skeleton Ship", porcelain paperclay by Rebecca Barfoot

 I’m building diminutive ceramic kayaks today, reminiscent of my time threading the waters of Baffin Bay this summer in just such a craft (which didn’t sink and never capsized!).  I found piles of seal and narwhal bones on Ikerinarmiut, a tiny island off the Greenland coast.  And ancient human remains nestled in an old rock cairn with a circular skyward opening, not far from my studio in Upernavik.  (Gasp!!  I’d never stumbled upon a human cranium just… lying there like that.  But this was the traditional Greenlandic way until only recent decades.) 

Untitled, by the young, gifted, and tragically fated Francesca Woodman,  MacDowell Colony, Peterbough, NH, 1980 

 For some reason I haven’t quite unearthed yet, I’m more in love with fall this year than I have been since my childhood in New Hampshire.  I was a maker of tree forts then, running around the woods looking for pokeberries and toads, excavating piles of crimson maple leaves to hide in.  Maybe the bones of the Arctic are bringing me back full circle to fall in love with a forgotten part of myself, at once old and young and giddy with living.

Exquisite Isolation

The artist's retreat 

I’m a few weeks into one of the most exquisitely isolated experiences of my life.  I live on an island off the northwest coast of Greenland in a small seaside cabin high above the Arctic Circle.  It feels like the edge of the world.

I am a guest of the Upernavik Museum, and my purpose here is art, research and discovery.  I spend my days exploring the small settlement of Upernavik, painting seascapes, writing, and filming.  I’m thinking about melting glaciers, retreating sea ice, and the warming of our delicate planet.

I have fallen in love with the silent stillness of this place, an understated landscape of bare essentials: rock and ice, sea and sky.   

And while I have forged a deep connection with the wildness of Greenland, I sometimes crave human relationship.  Upernavik is home to a few hundred inhabitants, largely Greenlandic-speaking Inuit. We share no language.  It’s hard to meet people here and even harder to converse.  I long to communicate my experience of the Arctic hinterlands, to ask questions and understand more about where I am by sharing something with the people who live here.   I am mute, silenced.

In isolation, my thoughts turn repeatedly toward home and the people I’ve left behind. There are few options for high tech communication here- my phone doesn’t work in Greenland and I spend too much energy trying to figure out how to access the internet. Occasionally I’m allowed to use the computer at the museum for a short time- for a fee and only if they are open and someone is in the office.

Today I’ve been frustrated.  Tears welled up in my eyes and blurred my vision as I was turned away from the museum for the 6^th day in a row.  Can't use the internet today.  Access denied, like typing the wrong password into my online bank login and the screen blinking shut on me- except that I am dealing with real people, not security codes.  I am confused, a fact again attributable to lack of common language.  I went to the only other place in town that might help me, a kiosk that sells chips, Coke, and occasional online access. The Danish owner asked- in the blunt, efficient manner of a true northern European- why I had no phone for internet, ending the conversation abruptly when I asked about paying for wireless.  “It’s not possible,” he shouted at me as I retreated out the door.    

I am ashamed to admit it, but I miss the world wide web.  I can’t decide if it’s a blessing or a blight, this high speed techno-tool that allows me connect across time zones and disparate ideologies with anyone and everyone.  I’m grateful that on most days I’m immersed in my work and the beautiful mystery of this place- and know better than to crave technology while in the rugged isolation of the Arctic.  

    

Local color- in the background, a fashionable young  mother pushes a baby stroller.

I can tell that family relationships in Greenland settlements are at the heart of life here, far more so than in the US.  Extended families of multiple generations often live together and homes are small and full.  I consider my own family, many of its ties broken and all of us scattered.   (My mother in New Hampshire just turned 75 while I was on the kayak expedition! I tried to call her on her birthday from the guide’s satellite phone, no luck.)  Back in the US I visit both parents maybe once a year, and briefly.  Divorced, they live on opposite ends of the country.  Being in Upernavik- where I am so distinctly an outsider and most often alone- makes me yearn for family engagement and the unconditional support that a family can sometimes provide.

Most exciting in the realm of correspondence are the hand written letters I’ve received from home.  Snail mail- in Greenland no less!- makes me melt. I save and savor the unopened envelopes, my eyes following the script of the address, the postmark, to find clues to its mysterious passage to me from the Rockies, the Pacific, or New England.   I do this for a day or two before devouring the words like much longed for sustenance.   

Letters and the forever-clutter of my desk.

POSTSCRIPT, August 6

I've left the retreat behind and am en route to the US.  I'm continuing to write offline at the Kangerlussuaq airport and have many hours ahead til I board my night flight to Copenhagen. "Kanger" has the bustling feel of much larger airport because it’s the main connector from Europe to Greenland.  Since I left Upernavik yesterday morning (only yesterday?) I’ve been experiencing culture shock.  I’ve emerged from the deep isolation of a remote northern community, overwhelmed. I hear English being spoken (and Danish, German) and sit now amidst a cacophony of other tourists and travelers.  I visited a supermarket yesterday in Ilulissat that was… well, it was (to my provincial mind) HUGE!  And sold things like cantaloupe, goji berries (?!) and pistachio nuts. Ilulissat was bustling with young Greenlandic hipsters decked out in the latest European fashions, smoking, wearing iPods.  I stayed in a hostel with a flush toilet.   As I’ve journeyed south,  I've reemerged in the postmodern world.  When I rolled into Kanger this afternoon, I headed to the International Science Support building and was invited to binge on free internet time. 

But back to the theme of isolation that defined my life in Upernavik less than 24 hours ago.  Already it seems so far away, already I miss the stillness and quiet that comes with so few distractions.  I know that whatever we have, we seem to crave the converse.  It's our nature.  What I won’t miss is being so utterly disconnected from the people that I love.  Like an umbilical cord that keeps me safely tethered to the known world, these relationships allow me the luxury and freedom to journey in the unknown world to stand at the remotest edge of myself.

Fog rises over the islands of Upernavik Fjord