Spooked: Just Make Yourself At Home
Photo courtesy Max Johnson
Spooked: Just Make Yourself at Home
A letter arrives in the mail and all of a sudden what has seemed familiar becomes strange; you can hardly believe it is possible that your house, the water you drink, the landscape you love, the mountain views you cherish –- all are threatened by a corporation and its shareholders, who want to lay down a 42” pipeline for natural gas that you and your neighbors don’t need and won’t have access to even if the pipeline is built.
All your hopes and dreams for this parcel of land, your desire to leave these acres to your children, are at the mercy of a federal agency that operates as if “public necessity” and “paying customers” are synonymous. The process apparently doesn’t have to take into account your safety, the places your children play, your well water, the property you believed was yours – the ground beneath your feet. It’s uncanny. You are being made an outsider on your own homestead.
The three works that comprise “Spooked: Just Make Yourself at Home” express how the threat of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) changes our sense of being at home in the landscape, and threatens some of our basic needs. I’m using “our” because, although I don’t live on this property, I live in Nelson Country. As an artist whose property was on the former preferred route, I know how disturbing it is to learn that the ground beneath your feet might literally be blasted away and that your quiet enjoyment of your own land might be forever disturbed in a way that cannot be mitigated.
The pieces also reflect that this property is home to children who play in the meadows and woods, who hunt for lightning bugs at night, build forts, paddle in the creeks. Another aspect of the works is that they refer to some of the history of the property. By including antique glass, old lace, a toy replica of a frontier house, the assemblages recall the history of the Morris land, and the old house, tobacco barn and family graveyard that remain.
In a way, all land is haunted, has haunting stories to tell. A little research conducted by a friend turned up the records of an estate settlement on this land that lists human slaves, farm equipment, animals and household items of lasting value, such as a coffee mill, all on the same ledger page in a spidery script.
I used the term “uncanny” earlier, hearkening to Freud’s essay of the same name, in which he discusses how what is intimate and familiar is at the root of the strange, the weird, the type of fear embodied in the concept of the uncanny. That strange interplay between what is home-like and what suddenly seems unfamiliar is invoked in these three works.
We are spooked, “no longer at ease here.” This phrase is from T.S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi. The Magus who is narrating says that when he and the other magi returned to their homelands after witnessing the birth (or death – the event has aspects of both, he notes), they found themselves “no longer at ease here in the old dispensation.”
A similar feeling of unease came to me, and so the echo of the famous poem, but there’s a twist here. The new dispensation in this story is our own awakening to how the system works and how it is rigged against landowners in rural areas who don’t have the power of corporations at their disposal. How it is rigged against the land itself. Part of the new dispensation includes a tenderness toward the planet as a whole – a sense that this living, breathing place that provides water and oxygen and shields us from the sun is ours to save, if we can, from the ravages of extractive industries. The status quo, that our awakening seeks to affect, even topple, is that the old gods remain; money and political capital hold sway.
It’s hard to make yourself at home anymore when you know the map puts your house in the “certain death” section of the blast zone. It’s hard to turn a blind eye when you know that methane is a greenhouse gas that is twenty-five percent more potent than carbon dioxide. These pieces are explorations of these questions and responses, and variations on them: what happens when your home-place is taken from you, what is the nature of this dis-ease of fossil fuel extraction and isn’t it uncanny, strangely familiar; what will happen in the long run, and will it haunt us?
© 2016 Amelia L. Williams
A letter arrives in the mail and all of a sudden what has seemed familiar becomes strange; you can hardly believe it is possible that your house, the water you drink, the landscape you love, the mountain views you cherish –- all are threatened by a corporation and its shareholders, who want to lay down a 42” pipeline for natural gas that you and your neighbors don’t need and won’t have access to even if the pipeline is built.
All your hopes and dreams for this parcel of land, your desire to leave these acres to your children, are at the mercy of a federal agency that operates as if “public necessity” and “paying customers” are synonymous. The process apparently doesn’t have to take into account your safety, the places your children play, your well water, the property you believed was yours – the ground beneath your feet. It’s uncanny. You are being made an outsider on your own homestead.
The three works that comprise “Spooked: Just Make Yourself at Home” express how the threat of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) changes our sense of being at home in the landscape, and threatens some of our basic needs. I’m using “our” because, although I don’t live on this property, I live in Nelson Country. As an artist whose property was on the former preferred route, I know how disturbing it is to learn that the ground beneath your feet might literally be blasted away and that your quiet enjoyment of your own land might be forever disturbed in a way that cannot be mitigated.
The pieces also reflect that this property is home to children who play in the meadows and woods, who hunt for lightning bugs at night, build forts, paddle in the creeks. Another aspect of the works is that they refer to some of the history of the property. By including antique glass, old lace, a toy replica of a frontier house, the assemblages recall the history of the Morris land, and the old house, tobacco barn and family graveyard that remain.
In a way, all land is haunted, has haunting stories to tell. A little research conducted by a friend turned up the records of an estate settlement on this land that lists human slaves, farm equipment, animals and household items of lasting value, such as a coffee mill, all on the same ledger page in a spidery script.
I used the term “uncanny” earlier, hearkening to Freud’s essay of the same name, in which he discusses how what is intimate and familiar is at the root of the strange, the weird, the type of fear embodied in the concept of the uncanny. That strange interplay between what is home-like and what suddenly seems unfamiliar is invoked in these three works.
We are spooked, “no longer at ease here.” This phrase is from T.S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi. The Magus who is narrating says that when he and the other magi returned to their homelands after witnessing the birth (or death – the event has aspects of both, he notes), they found themselves “no longer at ease here in the old dispensation.”
A similar feeling of unease came to me, and so the echo of the famous poem, but there’s a twist here. The new dispensation in this story is our own awakening to how the system works and how it is rigged against landowners in rural areas who don’t have the power of corporations at their disposal. How it is rigged against the land itself. Part of the new dispensation includes a tenderness toward the planet as a whole – a sense that this living, breathing place that provides water and oxygen and shields us from the sun is ours to save, if we can, from the ravages of extractive industries. The status quo, that our awakening seeks to affect, even topple, is that the old gods remain; money and political capital hold sway.
It’s hard to make yourself at home anymore when you know the map puts your house in the “certain death” section of the blast zone. It’s hard to turn a blind eye when you know that methane is a greenhouse gas that is twenty-five percent more potent than carbon dioxide. These pieces are explorations of these questions and responses, and variations on them: what happens when your home-place is taken from you, what is the nature of this dis-ease of fossil fuel extraction and isn’t it uncanny, strangely familiar; what will happen in the long run, and will it haunt us?
© 2016 Amelia L. Williams
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The Glass Palisade
We usually think of the home or homestead as a place of safety, and a palisade as a tall barrier we might have seen in Westerns, usually built to enclose a fortress or similar frontier outpost. Outside the realm of movies and historical forts, your everyday fencing helps define home, yard, garden, pasture and property boundaries. Back when the Morris family lived on this property and built a typical two-over-two house and a tobacco-curing barn, they probably had a picket fence around the garden to deter deer, and keep out grazing livestock. A regular fence wouldn’t stop the most dangerous predators—humans—nor the occasional panther. I chose the word “palisade” for the title of this piece because it has an ethereal, otherworldly sound to it; it evokes fairy tales, maybe. And in truth, we have been living in a kind of fairy tale when it comes to our thinking about fossil fuels. |
Surprise: a gift left by the fairies
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The glass palisade in this work suggests that the concept of the homestead as a place of safety is fragile, perhaps illusory. Although their wealth may keep Dominion board members and leadership safe, temporarily, from the effects of their own pipelines and compressor stations, they are living, not just within a glass palisade, but in figurative glass houses; none of us is safe from the ravages of climate disruption. And this disruption, from rising temperatures and more volatile weather patterns, to melting sea ice is, of course, exacerbated by natural gas extraction and transport. Methane inevitably leaks all along the route, and back where the gas comes from, all the processes of fracking endanger our waterways and may bring on earthquakes. The little frontier house is surrounded with glass. What can keep it safe?
Buzz: Beehive Solstice Tree
Hearkening back to traditional skeps, basket beehives used by early settlers, yet also recalling winter solstice holiday trees and wreaths, this beehive installation speaks to the idea of home and how we may feel when home is threatened. As a putative beehive, it sits at the bottom of a bowl-shaped, spring-fed meadow that is alive with wildflowers and bees.
As a solstice tree of pinecones, it hangs with decorations that suggest an atmosphere of threat and destruction. The jaunty bird’s nest at the top of the tree nevertheless drips with red; the structure, so merry looking from afar, hangs with bones. While the threat to beings is indicated in red, the threat to unbroken forests is intimated in the yellow-green drips that run down the edge of the tree to the snakeskin on the lowest circle: the blood of trees.
Inside the structure are a toy house, wooden bear, and alphabet blocks scattered on antique lace. The energy of the decorative copper coils, warmth of local homespun wool, industriousness implied in decorative sections of honeycomb and wasp nest all speak to the strength in community and hopefulness that form the center of our efforts to prevent the ACP from being built. Where have we come from, where are we going, how will the next generation respond to what we have left them? Can we celebrate the winter solstice, the last dark day, and turn toward the coming of the light? What would that look like?
Surprise
Children build fairy houses assuming, hoping, wishing that the fairies will come to stay, will cavort at night, in the moonlight, or in secret when the grown-ups are not looking. Fairy houses tell the tale of children’s understanding that the woods are full of magic, that magic can happen anywhere if you just prepare the way.
As adults, when we become intimate with a landscape, when we start becoming “indigenous to place,” (a phrase used by Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book Braiding Sweetgrass), when we sense that we belong to the land more than it belongs to us, then we too are building a home for the magic, for the future, for the necessary adaptation—hush—do you hear wings?
© 2016 Amelia L. Williams
Buzz: Beehive Solstice Tree
Hearkening back to traditional skeps, basket beehives used by early settlers, yet also recalling winter solstice holiday trees and wreaths, this beehive installation speaks to the idea of home and how we may feel when home is threatened. As a putative beehive, it sits at the bottom of a bowl-shaped, spring-fed meadow that is alive with wildflowers and bees.
As a solstice tree of pinecones, it hangs with decorations that suggest an atmosphere of threat and destruction. The jaunty bird’s nest at the top of the tree nevertheless drips with red; the structure, so merry looking from afar, hangs with bones. While the threat to beings is indicated in red, the threat to unbroken forests is intimated in the yellow-green drips that run down the edge of the tree to the snakeskin on the lowest circle: the blood of trees.
Inside the structure are a toy house, wooden bear, and alphabet blocks scattered on antique lace. The energy of the decorative copper coils, warmth of local homespun wool, industriousness implied in decorative sections of honeycomb and wasp nest all speak to the strength in community and hopefulness that form the center of our efforts to prevent the ACP from being built. Where have we come from, where are we going, how will the next generation respond to what we have left them? Can we celebrate the winter solstice, the last dark day, and turn toward the coming of the light? What would that look like?
Surprise
Children build fairy houses assuming, hoping, wishing that the fairies will come to stay, will cavort at night, in the moonlight, or in secret when the grown-ups are not looking. Fairy houses tell the tale of children’s understanding that the woods are full of magic, that magic can happen anywhere if you just prepare the way.
As adults, when we become intimate with a landscape, when we start becoming “indigenous to place,” (a phrase used by Robin Wall Kimmerer in her book Braiding Sweetgrass), when we sense that we belong to the land more than it belongs to us, then we too are building a home for the magic, for the future, for the necessary adaptation—hush—do you hear wings?
© 2016 Amelia L. Williams