repatriating the stones

The last day in Alfred. I took the numbered stones left over from the exhibition and put them back where I had found them. When the snow melts in spring, I hope that walkers will find them, under the melted snow.

Intact

Intact
diagram of a Steinheim Museum Display Case (courtesy of Alfred University Archives), glass shelving and bought, found and borrowed artefacts.

diagram of a Steinheim Museum display case (courtesy of Alfred University Archives)

I found this anonymous, undated document in the University Archives. It lists categories of artefacts in one museum case from the Steinheim at a time when the museum's collection was mostly intact but starting to disappear.

Now that all of the artefacts have been lost, sold or stolen, the categories CHINESE, WOOD FRAGMENT, COLONIAL AND GENERAL, JAPANESE seem absurdly broad and give only the slightest hint of what had once been on the shelf. I used this document as a set of instructions to recreate the six shelves of the case using objects I found, bought, borrowed or made from around Alfred.

Intact: installation views


detail: Chinese

detail: Chinese medicine / Chinese books

detail: wood fragment / South Sea Islands

detail: things chewed by mice

detail: items in bad shape

Photographing the Amish

Photographing the Amish I (captured pigeon)
Taxidermied pigeon, wire basket

I met an Amish boy who had just captured a pigeon in an upturned bicycle basket. He and the pigeon looked at me mutely when I stumbled across them in a goat barn. You are not allowed to photograph the Amish and knowing this has burnt images from my meetings with them into my mind.

I asked Elva, an Amish woman how she remembered particular events where non-Amish people might use photography. She looked at me as though I was crazy and said “we just remember them”.


Photographing the Amish II (the difference)
vinyl lettering


Photographing the Amish III (re-enacted barn raising)
re-enacted sound (wood, corrugated metal, nails), chair, speakers, mp3 player, ink drawing

We stood and watched an Amish barn raising. Fifty or so men and boys clung in blue dungarees on the scaffold of a huge two storey barn, working. Nails were driven into planks by three men kneeling on a bench of piled breeze blocks, the planks were carried away by someone else, then hoisted into place and nailed down by a team of others. The sound was three-dimensional. Fifty hammers hitting fifty nails into the wooden skeleton of the barn. I didn’t close my eyes but if I had I bet I would still have seen it from the huge, hollow, acoustic shape of the hammers hitting.

Amish barn raising re-enactment

A clip from the finished 45 minute re-enactment of an Amish barn raising.

replica north korean pointing sticks (glass)

glass, enamel paint. glass blown by Angus Powers, assisted by Tom

These sticks are painted glass replicas of an original wooden pointing stick that I got on a trip to North Korea. They were used in each of the many museums we visited to direct guests toward what they should be looking at and away from what they shouldn't.

The replicas are made from glass, and if used to point too decisively at anything would shatter.

finished time capsule

The sign on the time capsule reads:

contents of time capsule

1. a mobile phone you can call and leave messages on
2. something that will last for a shorter period than the capsule will remain closed
3. the things that used to be above where it's buried
4. the earth from the hole it's buried in
5. the sign saying where it is buried
6. fossils

You could call the mobile phone in the time capsule from the telephone, hear its muffled ring and leave an anonymous answerphone message to be buried with the capsule.

number stories

There were a group of 4 visitors to the exhibition today who lay for two hours amongst the stones looking for numbers pertinent to their lives.

7,000 stones opening

Visitors to my exhibition opening choosing which of the 7,000 numbered stones they want to take home.

7,000 Stones

thanksgiving is an important American holiday

Over thanksgiving I photographed 7,000 numbered stones individually. It took three days.

empty bear

I visited the Taxidermist who taught me how to skin a pigeon and he lent me an entire tanned bear hide. It's the most exquisite and heartbreaking object, halfway between a bear and a rug. A leathery bear ghost. An empty bear.

indian relics relics

night deer

At night when you drive or walk here, deer step out in front of you. I am completely enchanted by their ephemeral appearance and departure against the incredible weight of seeing them.

One night, while we were driving, a huge buck walked from the bushes and stood in front of us in the road. We were meters behind him, lighting him up white in the headlights. His head was turned away, looking at something invisible to us up the hill. It was startling and silent.

a gentle sign

One of the things I love most about being here is that it is possible to see an beautiful and forlorn empty sign by the roadside, pointing at nothing, go in and talk to the amazingly friendly people who work in the shop (on the counter is a sign "free hugs") and arrange to borrow it from them for a week. They will bring it on the back of their truck for my exhibition opening in December. The sign has a space where you can write text using removable plastic letters. I will write 7,000 STONES on it.

They told me that the local kids come at night and steal the plastic letters from the sign. A boy was recently killed in the village and the kids come and take the letters that spell out his name.

archie

Today I walked for an hour in the rain. I had just been horse riding and had learned to canter for the first time. My body was full of the new movement which my gait discretely mirrored.

The best shop

punishment

I went to a trophy shop to order an engraved plaque. The owner's son was writing out lines. He keeps sneaking food back in to the living room, she told me, now he's up to 600.

the difference

An Amish woman gave me directions to visit their Elder.

She said:
follow the black top until the yellow widens then go onto the rough road.

I would have said:
go west on the 417 then take the 68.

deer season

This is the only country I have been to where it is not alarming to see a large group of men dressed in homemade uniforms loading guns by the side of the road.

accidental haiku

I bought a diary from 1975 from a second hand shop. Each month is contained within a small black bound book. A careful blue biro entry has been made every day except for one Friday the 13th up until June, when it stops abruptly.

The format of each entry is identical; the temperature, the weather and then one or more clipped personal sentences; Jeannine went to hairdressers. Did income tax. My Birthday (66).

The language is so spare, each entry reads simply as an affirmation of an existence. The temperature is 40 degrees = I am alive.
It warmed up in the P.M. = I am alive.

I was struck by the similarity to the Japanese poetic form, the Haiku.
I went through each book and marked the entries that accidentally adhere to the Haiku rule.



Contemporary English-language Haiku definition by wikipedia

1. Use of three (or fewer) lines of 17 or fewer syllables
2. Use of a seasonal word
3. Use of a cut to contrast and compare, implicitly, two events, images, or situations

haunted house

The fraternity house opposite my front door held a haunted house event over Halloween.

This is how it went: You go in and wait in a wood paneled room with a huge flat screen television mounted on the end wall. There is a bowl of twiglets. There is American football on the television with the sound down. We are the only guests. Two boys/men? stand outside and argue quietly about what to do with us.

One of them comes to get us. He has a pale face and may have had vampire teeth, I don’t remember clearly. He is though definitely holding a torch. He beckons us with the torch to follow him and tells us, with a very sincere and concerned expression, that no harm will come to us if we stay with him.

He leads us down a hallway hung with paddles, the oar-like sticks that new recruits to the fraternity are beaten with. These are not part of the halloween decoration but I have been imagining the inside of this house for three months and I am scared of the sticks. I am not scared though of the cobwebs and bloody rags that have been draped over them.

We go down a narrow stairway to the basement. A small plastic skull on tracks moves a few inches up and down. In the basement there is a 1930’s bar.

One barkeeper cleans a glass with a tea towel. One man leans with his girlfriend on the bar. She dances in the way that people do on television when there was no music. He looks at her.

The rest of the huge room is empty save for the lazy reflected light of the glitterball. Everyone looks at us (this happens here anyway). Our leader takes us to a serving hatch where we see a huge grinning hand-wiping chef. He wears a bloody apron and shouts that we should come back in ten minutes to eat. He laughs a lot. We go upstairs back down the hallway of beating sticks. Our guide tells us we should look in the rooms. He says it like this: “Oh! I wonder what will be in here??” then after we have seen a screaming person's leg buzzed off by the disc sander or the student repeatedly stabbing a boy he says it again, with exactly the same intonation. “Oh! I wonder what will be in here?” There is always something scary in the rooms, and then people try to grab you.

After ten minutes we went back down to the kitchen. A silver serving dish waited for us. The waiter lifted the lid and there was a real screaming woman’s head underneath it. I think it may have been the dancer.

The hand-wiping chef burst forth from the kitchen revving a chainsaw. A real chainsaw. He chased us, brandishing it in front of him. We ran upstairs to the top floor between the rooms and witnessed half-finished scenes of confused murdered people about to lie down, a group of three boys shouting on the fire escape and the t-shirt of our guide become covered in blood and stab wounds. We were upstairs and the high drone of the chainsaw seemed to be at the bottom of each flight of stairs we tried to descend.

making north korean pointing sticks in glass

Casting a north korean pointing stick in bronze

halloween

We went dressed like this to a private party in a log cabin in the woods to which we weren't invited and sat at the end of the table. A man played Oops I did it again on a 12 string guitar. It was wonderful.

L to R; M. Hernandez, L. Clayton, J. Price

64 museum guards

59 librarians

Reenacting the sound of an Amish barn-raising

The barn-raising from memory

I made each individual sound that I can remember from watching an Amish barn-raising. They will be combined into a soundscape of fifty hammering, climbing and working men and the women, children and passers-by who watched them work

7,000 stones (four)

Stones no. 1744 - no. 1891

Labelled, unnumbered stones

The finished, drying pigeon

Taxidermy

Two months ago I met an Amish boy in a barn who had just captured a pigeon in an upturned bicycle basket. He and the pigeon looked at me mutely when I stumbled across them in a goat barn. You are not allowed to photograph the Amish and knowing this has burnt images from my meetings with them into my usually forgetful mind. I am recreating some of these memories as sculptures, sounds and stories.

I returned to the taxidermist to oversee the ruffling up of the pigeons feathers so that it looked startled. The taxidermist handed me a dead pigeon who had been shot in the head and we skinned them together. These are the steps for stuffing a pigeon. 1. Remove body 2. Wash with Dawn dish detergent 3. Dry in a tumble dryer 4. Fill body cavity with foam. 5. Add eyes 6. Arrange pose and leave to dry.

puzzled

photograph by James Price

7,000 stones (three)

There are dangerous water snakes who live under big flat stones in this creek but I didn't realise until after I had collected many big flat stones. I didn't see any snakes.

At the natural history museum

announcement at an american football game

Artefact no. 3

eskimo spear

Artefact no. 2

collection of foreign shoes

7,000 stones (two)

The woman who lived in the next house came out and asked us what we were doing in an angry tone. I said we were collecting stones. She went back indoors.

We collected 446 tonight in the headlights of the car.

7,000 stones (one)

The story of the Steinheim is of a complete human cycle of the effort to understand the world through the collecting, naming and organisation of things. Objects were removed from their context, collected together and displayed.

And then the process unravelled backwards, the artefacts were taken, lost, sold and stolen - dispersing back into the world. But now they carry with them the remnants of a new chapter in their history. An obsolete catalogue number is evidence of their having been part of a collection and having once stood in for some part of our history, as an example of Eskimo hunting tools, or early Chinese footwear.

The building was also a collection. It was made with 7,000 stones collected by hand from within a three mile radius of Alfred by President Allen, his wife and the students of the university. In order he said, to demonstrate the diversity of the earth on which we stand.

I'm thinking of making a sculpture that follows this process. I am going to collect and number 7,000 stones from within three miles of my studio. I will show the pile in an exhibition at the end of my residency and will encourage people to take stones away with them so that the collection, in the same manner as the Steinheim collection, disperses back into the homes and attics of local people.

(batteries, broken chairs, metal)

animal competition

Three dogs
One cat
thirty-two horses
Five Vultures
Some Ravens (or Crows)
A groundhog
A kestrel
An American Screech Owl
A barn owl
Two deer
A skunk!

>>Animals we saw today in upstate New York<<>

the first lost artefact

The Village Visits

Nine people from Alfred came in to tell stories of village life to my class of 120 students. A local historian spoke about his great-grandmother being chased by a bear when the area was first settled. A drama teacher told us in that in winter families used to eat snow covered with maple syrup for pudding. The owner of a local shop gave a beautiful and heartfelt talk about the honest trade of a grocer. A flautist told us about the Alfred Village Band who can't rehearse until 7.15 in the summer when the sun has gone behind the tree and they are able to see the conductor. The fire brigade and the police chief came. A hunter showed slides of bears, squirrels, foxes and other animals who populate the woods. The students said aah and smiled at the screen. "They might look cute... " he said,
"...but they're a MENACE.".
Deers eat flowers. Squirrels burn down houses.


The Hunter. Each speaker got a pumpkin as a thank-you gift

Grand Canyon of the East

Photograph by James Price

In the car park two older women had been left in the back seat of their car by their daughter and son in law. The woman on the west side had trapped a towel in the rolled up window and they silently sat side by side in its half shade.

The waterfall at Letchworth Park had been used the week before as the backdrop to a romantic scene in the American soap opera Days of our Lives. The daughter, who now lived in Florida, had been so excited to see a background that she remembered from her childhood on the television that she had driven up and insisted on visiting. And that’s why they were there, in the car park, quietly waiting for them to come back.

night dear

a time capsule time capsule

Every town in New York State has to have a historian by LAW. It's illegal to forget local history (after about 1800).
I wrote to thirty local history societies and asked them if they had any time capsules they might have buried and a list of what's in them if they have.

things I would put in a time capsule

a mobile phone you can call and leave messages on
something that will last for a shorter period than the capsule will remain closed
the things that used to be above where it's buried
the earth from the hole it's buried in
the sign saying where it is buried
fossils

the difference

the difference between america and england (in paper)