Gretchen's Environmental Art Project

I spent a long time thinking about what materials I wanted to use for my project and what designs were already apparent in the world around me. I thought about what was happening out there in the natural world—snow melting, the earth showing a little more each day, dirty snow, chunks of ice, buds in trees, birds making nests, maple sap dripping, water starting to flow in the streams, the wind blowing. As I drove around, I looked around me. I saw logging trucks with big stacks of logs, the butt-ends round circles piled on top of one another. That’s the same pattern I saw in stone walls—round, or nearly-round, chunks of rock piled on top of one another. So, I started thinking about circles. I also thought of things poking up through the snow that have been buried since last fall when the snow began to fall. That drew my mind to vertical patterns. Then I began to just concentrate on what things appealed to me—I like leaves, and am especially drawn to the leaves of beech trees and oak trees that stay on the trees late into the winter. I had an idea that I would take some beech tree leaves and lay them out on the pristine white top of the snow, and then sprinkle dirt on them—dirt from the piled up, ugly snow banks, and then take the leaves away, leaving a white leaf-print. To me that would draw attention to making art of what we think of as ugly at this time of year.  I also thought about taking maple syrup and making designs with it on the snow, but, I reasoned, that would be wasting perfectly good maple syrup. In the end, I decided on something entirely different. I thought about liquid. This is the time of year when we have a lot of liquid. I also thought of cows (since we did the brainstorming in class I had cows and milk on my mind). I decided to make some edible art—a bowl of oatmeal with a moat of milk and a lake of maple syrup in it. It was fun to make, and even better to eat. The milk is whole, raw, unpasteurized milk that I buy for $4 a gallon at the organic dairy farm a mile from my house. I love walking into the warm, steamy, rich manure-smelling barn once a week, waving to Mark Turner, the farmer, who comes away from the milking for a moment to fill my milk jug from the huge silver bulk tank in the milk house. When I go into the barn, the cows, some black and white, some big-eyed Brown Swiss, look at me with interest. The syrup comes from the trees around my house, which you all helped tap earlier this month. The oatmeal comes from oats grown in Maine and purchased at the Better Living Center in Farmington. So, I made some edible art. Eating well and eating locally is important to me; so is eating beautiful food. The idea of a moat of milk and a lake of maple syrup in a bowl oatmeal felt abundant to me.  (532 words).