Making Beneath the Umbrella with my co-creator Phoebe Meyers was a major chapter of my residency at Art Farm. It was a form of collaboration I've never experienced before and could not have planned -- physical making to creative writing, back to physical making. It allowed us to explore the alignment of concepts across media, as well as the ways in which interdisciplinary thinking can expand meaning. Making this piece with Phoebe definitely shifted my conceptual associations with umbrella fabric, a material I've been working with regularly for half a year. We also got to share our installation with the rest of the Art Farm community, which was a really special thing I didn't think I would get to experience during a pandemic.
Origin
Phoebe was one of the first people I met during my residency at Art Farm. We were around the same age, both first timers at the farm, and both a little skittish around our (many) house critters. One of the first things I did when I arrived, after throwing all of my stuff into a room, was ask Phoebe to walk around the property with me. She happily did so, sharing all of the knowledge that she had gained a few hours before.
Phoebe is a creative nonfiction writer and poet from Ohio who writes a lot about the American midwest. She was working out of the "Thinking Hut," a little cabin way out in the fields with (this year) no maintained path. Every day Phoebe would bundle up all of her stuff and fight through the tall grass to go write.
We lived in two houses together, and we spent a lot of time on our roof decks. One evening in the Barns, as we were sitting on the deck with yoga mats and glasses of wine, I noted the plastic tarp hanging over the driveway below us.
When I said I wanted to make a tarp out of umbrellas, it was a half-formed thought.
Phoebe laughed, paused, and then said, "It's funny you should say that."
A week earlier, after a conversation about my umbrellas and a lot of other farm inspiration, she had written a short story in which a character (kind of me, but as a vole who is a gallery artist in the big city) did almost exactly that. At the point that she wrote the story, we had talked a little bit about my conceptual connections to the umbrella material, but not a lot, so she filled in the gaps.
In Phoebe's story, the "fine art vole" roamed the streets of New York at night collecting abandoned umbrellas, and assembled them into a large tent-like installation. For the vole, this was an exploration of intimacy, capturing the feeling of sharing an umbrella with someone you love. The rest of the story is Phoebe's to tell, but it took about 5 seconds after this explanation for us to decide that we were going to bring the umbrella tarp to life. Like the vole's tent, we would use the discarded umbrellas to explore themes of intimacy. We would do this by integrating prompts to facilitate open conversations between viewers.
Process
The next morning, Phoebe came to my studio for the first time. We did some brainstorming and some sketching. After really struggling to capture our 3D ideas on the page, we made a model using an old window frame, a piece of cloth that was lying on the counter, and a needle and thread. The final piece ended up looking nothing like this, but our model helped us explore some of the draping ideas that did make it into our final installation. We also thought of hanging the prompts while playing with the umbrella cap beads that hung from the model.
The model helped us make one more major decision: the layout of the tarp would be a mixture of the fabric from whole umbrellas and triangular panels from partial umbrellas. The "peaks" created by the tension of the hangers would correspond to the whole umbrellas, so that a person standing below would see roughly umbrella-like shapes in those spots.
Then we just started pinning things together. When we felt good about a certain section, I would disconnect it from the rest and take it inside to sew. We went too big, too fast at first, and I ended up reworking entire sections in assembly. The chickens were also very present for this part of the process, and we were constantly chasing them away so they wouldn't get near the pins.
As we worked, we brainstormed questions to use as discussion prompts. Phoebe did some prototyping to figure out how the prompts should hang, and how to treat the paper. We weren't able to track down a type writer, so we decided Phoebe would write the prompts by hand.
After a few days of sewing, we did a "test hang" in what was going to be a temporary spot. We liked the cozy feeling of setting the tarp back in the woods, so we ended up using the same spot for the final installation. We used yarn and safety pins for the hangers in this rough draft, which taught us that we needed to upgrade to fishing line. We also hadn't finished all of the trimming and finishing at this point, which is why the underside still looks quite messy.
After the test hang, we took the whole thing down and dragged it up the stairs into to our kitchen. Then I sat on the floor with a needle, scissors, and fishing line to do the final prep work.
Installation
We put it back up 2 days later, on Phoebe's last day on the farm.
The only remaining step after this was to sew in the discussion prompts (and take some fun photos in and around it). Pandemic note: We had been living together for 3+ weeks with very little contact with the outside world when these photos were taken.
We also tied three pieces of paper to a tree, displaying Phoebe's caption:
"Beneath the Umbrella is an installation of reclaimed umbrella material that reimagines the intimacy of sharing an umbrella with a friend.
Use the hanging prompts to start a conversation with yourself or with another. If you'd like, you can use the following mindful listening exercise with your confidant.
Mindful listening: 1) One party speaks aloud for two minutes. 2) The other party listens while making no visual or verbal cues (nods, "yeah!"). 3) The listening party then repeats the speaker's response back to them. 4) The parties then switch roles, with the same or new prompt."
It was messy and fun and probably not how I would show it in a gallery, but the haphazard aspects of the installation process felt right for both the piece and the environment that we made it in.
Opening
Just a few hours after installation, we invited the other residents to a combination installation opening / sendoff for Phoebe. Everyone was really supportive and almost immediately started partnering up. They were very receptive to the discussion prompts and the active listening technique.
Phoebe and I both experienced the piece with fresh eyes by going "Beneath the Umbrella" with other residents. Even though I'd been working on it for days and had come up with some of the questions myself, fully committing to the exercise with someone who was not my co-creator was an entirely new experience. The answers I shared were not the ones that had bounced around in the back of my head while Phoebe and I developed the questions. They were, truly, more genuine and more emotional. I'm so grateful to my partner and to all our other co-residents, for their openness.
Pandemic note: Covid-19 rates were pretty low in most of the towns near us, we were fully outdoors, and there was plenty of room to maintain appropriate separation (even when you were "Beneath the Umbrella" with someone).
Conclusion
When I arrived in Nebraska, I didn't expect to show work at all, or to do anything collaborative. I didn't know if the pandemic would leave any room for community among strangers. I reminded myself of how productive and/or reflective a month of near isolation might be, just in case.
I'm so grateful for what I got instead. My time at Art Farm has already sort of changed my life: it took me only a few weeks to leave my job after I got back. But working with Phoebe and being influenced in big and small ways by the other artists around me will undoubtedly change the work I make in the future for the better.
We're living in hard and scary times right now, but people need people. If you have a safe and responsible way to build community - do it!
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