theWABASHproject
FIELD/WORK April- May 2024
FIELD/WORK was our first nature themed exhibit at theWABASHproject from April-May 2024.
As humans we have tilled and worked the soil for thousands of years and with farming came craft and with craft came art. In April 2024, we celebrated spring and our first Skagit Valley Tulip Festival with four Pacific Northwest female artists whose work illustrated the patterns, colors, textures we sow into our work and onto our lands. TheWABASHproject’s first curated event, FIELD/WORK was an exploration of the close connection of art to the tending of land.
Sheila Shanti (weaver) and Christine Chaney (conceptual designer)'s colorful hoop weavings, referenced the primitive wheel of time and change and the natural flow of plant growth throughout the earth's seasons.
Christine Chaney's playful field installations referenced the evolution of getting to know a patch of Earth and the lessons to be learned for the tender.
Jane Kidder's textural and meditative paintings referenced the wilds of "un-handled" landscapes in contrast with the strict rows of "handled" fields.
Pamela Mills methodical watercolors were studies in the capturing of color in a landscape as well as referencing the rows and grids of organized crops in the fields.
Though the works were different in medium and methods they fed off each other in a very compelling way and the play between the four artists' work was vibrant and exactly what theWABASHproject's mission is: to bring artist's and objects together to create a conversation about our relationship with nature and the healing that can occur from our reconnection with it. Our first artist reception was well attended and an effervescent celebration of the artists, the art and the return of spring to our verdant valley.
Why theWABASHproject?
In 2019 I had a very potent dream. In this dream a friend gave me a beat up old storefront packed to the ceiling with broken furniture and bric-a-brac. After clearing it out, I created a refuge and a home; a space for creativity, meditation and for tending what needed tending. Visitors traded white stones for the things they needed. I awoke in the middle of the night and in half wakefulness named it theWABASHproject
The next morning I told my husband about the dream. And though I grew up in Indiana living and playing in the woods and the creeks on the Wabash river’s banks, when he read what Wikipedia had to say about the name, I was delightfully surprised.
“The name "Wabash" is an English spelling of the French name for the river, "Ouabache". French traders named the river after the Miami-Illinois word for the river, waapaahšiiki, meaning
pure water over white stones.”
The white stones are referring to the place where the clear river water ran over bright expanses of limestone. We humans are like rivers, our “banks” or bodies always shifting and changing, but we are always moving, returning, flowing back to Mother Ocean.
This dream, the Wabash project, is the idea of flow and motion and allowing nature to take a greater part in our healing. This is happening not only in a small town in a tiny storefront in the front of our home on the Skagit River, but hopefully in all the hearts of those who visit and use it. You, the visitor, participant, vendor, artist are the pure water flowing over our limestone sills.
WELCOME!