Small Pond Trading Cards, Part 3

Here's the continuation of our "trading card" series celebrating
and looking back at the first six years of Small Pond Arts.

Banner by Leanne Shea Rhem

Installation by Georga Ryan

SEE PART 1

SEE PART 2

SEE PART 4

Stickfest 2015

On Saturday we welcomed friends old and new to the annual Festival of the Stick, our much-loved celebration of the humble and mighty stick. This year's featured activity was Kubb, a game we picked up in Sweden a few months ago.

The game involves two teams throwing sticks at each other's "kubbs" - blocks of wood. It looks pretty simplistic but it's quite challenging and extremely fun! Kubb was a big hit with our residents over the summer, so we knew it would be the perfect activity to celebrate Stickfest.

We also had our ever-popular stick-painting activity. We love seeing kids mucking around with paint. Get 'em hooked while they're young, I say!

But the heart of Stickfest is our pop-up Stick Museum. 

Visitors are always delighted to discover that yes, there really are a lot of different sticks in the world, and that we have gone to great (ridiculous?) lengths collecting specimens from around the world and displaying them in informative and creative ways.

We had some fantastick new donations to the museum, like this Anarchistick from Christine Renaud:

A bundle of Artisticks from Rick Zimmerman: 

And this spectacularly bug-carved stick from Joan McBride:

Stickfest is always a great time; maybe next year you'll join us? Our friend Ember will tell you what to do:

Peter Paylor and another Sticky Story

Earlier this month Belleville sculptor Peter Paylor undertook a 1-week artist residency at Small Pond. He showed up with his tools and started looking around the farm for inspiration.

He quickly found it in a stack of old cedar rails. Soon the cedar shavings were piling up on the barn floor, perfuming the air with that fresh-hamster-cage smell.

He was working on something… something big!

During Peter’s stay I was hosting a Creative Rural Minds event at nearby Loch Sloy; Peter came along and did a carving demonstration.

Here's Peter with part of his finished sculpture, Community. It is built from eight pieces of  cedar rail fence found on the property; it forms a single piece representing a community of ravens. Behind him you can see another carved fence rail he left as a gift to Small Pond. 

But Peter had one more gift to give us. It was a story. I recorded his telling of the story one night over dinner:

“It was the first Stickfest, in 2010 (an annual festival at Small Pond). I sat at the firepit and I was carving a piece of Hesperus (one of our trees that had fallen down), and Lisa sat down and started twisting some wire and making some jewelry. Another woman came and sat down and started knitting, and eventually the circle was filled with people, but we didn’t know anybody. I was introduced to this young kid, who was maybe about 13 at the time, and I was told that he did some carving, and he was curious about me carving this stick. I asked him if he’d ever carved sumac before. He hadn’t, and I had a sumac talking stick in the car so I got it and we talked about carving sumac."

"The woman sitting beside me asked about the stick and I said that it was a talking stick and told her that they’re used in groups and sometimes used in storytelling circles, and I said since you’re holding it, why don’t you tell us a story? Without hesitation she did. She told this cool story, and it was about a tree. And then she passed it to the person sitting beside her, it was a young guy, and he told a story about falling out of a tree; there were a couple of tree stories. There was a very young kid, and I thought that there’s no way that the stick is going to get to him and beyond him, but sure enough he had this great story. All the time this was going on there was a woman sitting there, and again, we didn’t know anybody. She was sitting there signing (American Sign Language). We weren’t sure if she was signing to someone. It turns out it was Mary Tiessen who we’ve since become friends with and she was actually signing for her husband, Jeff, who was sitting beside her."

"When Mary passed the stick to Jeff she signed to explain the whole process of what had been going on and he grabbed the stick and held it against his chest and thought for minute and put the stick down on his lap, and out of his hands and amazing expressive face and out of Mary’s mouth came this beautiful story about how he had gone diving with his father when he was a kid and they had this shore lunch and they had stopped in this cove and it was the most beautiful place they’d ever seen and wouldn’t it be great if we could build a cabin here one day and they thought about it and they went to the province of Newfoundland and they negotiated for years and actually bought this crown land and they actually built the cabin. It was a beautiful story, people were in tears, I was in tears. Then when he was done he got so excited he started giving thumbs up and jumping up and down, and he rushed over and hugged me. And all day at Stickfest he kept giving me thumbs up and hugging me. I asked Mary later, it seems a bit much…? and she said: he never gets to tell a story."

"That was my favourite moment of when I got to use one of my own talking sticks. I actually told this story to one of the organizers of the Ottawa Storytellers’ Group, and last I heard they were planning on arranging a storytelling circle for the Deaf.”

Incredibly, this was the first time we’d heard this story, which happened almost five years ago. It makes me think of the impact you can have on someone’s life when you give them an opportunity to express themselves. And at the heart of it, that is what Small Pond is all about.

After hearing Peter's story, I dug through my photos.
This photo is from Stickfest 2010, and this is some of the
circle of people described in his story.

Lighting Fall Fires

This fall Small Pond has been positively abuzz with activity. I've been working like mad on my project Puppets Without Borders… and then there was Stickfest… but oh no, that is not all! A few weeks ago we hosted the Experimental Lantern Laboratory, which was the first creative step in what will become the inaugural Firelight Lantern Festival in the works for April 2013. We brought together artists and community members in a free-form workshop, where they could play around with the materials and make anything they wanted.

Many worked in pairs; everything is more fun with a friend.

In the month prior to the festival, these creative souls will be our workshop leaders, going out into the community, hosting 20 workshops around Prince Edward County. They’ll be working with people of all ages to create lanterns which everyone will bring to the festival and carry in the procession. Other lanterns will be made to hang in shop windows on Main Street Picton.

We call ourselves The Department of Illumination. Our goal is to bring our community together and light up the night with creativity. If this initial workshop is anything to go by, I think that we’re in for an amazingly fun time.

Back row, L to R: Norman Markland, Nella Casson, Krista Dalby, Shelby Larner, Susanne Larner, Liz Zylstra.

Front row, L to R: Mile Murtanovski, Chrissy Poitras, Kyle Topping

This past weekend we hosted a writer’s retreat let by Chris Kay Fraser of Firefly Creative Writing, called “Spark Your Creative Fires for Fall.” With eight participants, including myself, it was a weekend filled with not just words on the page, but also with great kindness – both to each other, and to our creative selves.

Chris led us through a series of writing exercises and prompts designed to get our engines running.

There were two periods of completely silent writing time, where we were encouraged to not even make eye contact with one another, and were free to work on whatever we liked.

I love having a house full of writers. People moving about in silence, respecting the tranquility of others and finding space for their own thoughts. The constant flow of caffeinated beverages, keeping those big, beautiful ideas silently blooming in every corner of the house, the yard, the grounds. What I will remember most was on the second night, when the silence was broken, and people shared the stories and poems they'd written. It was very moving to listen to all of these incredible, vivid, inner worlds bursting out into the world for the first time. We discussed how we could tell when a piece of writing was “good,” and one of the writers said, “I know a piece of writing is good when it makes me want to cry.” I sense that I wasn't the only one who had a lump in their throat that night.

On our last morning together, and as our last act as a group, we each wrote on a rock a few words that were meaningful to us.

We walked out to the woods, relishing these last moments as our time together drew to a close. We placed our rocks in the forest, amongst the other art on the artists’ trail.

Then Chris gave us one last gift, reading us a poem, stoking the fires within us with one last breath of wisdom and beauty.

Chris reads us one last poem

Although autumn is often thought of as a time of endings, this year the fall seems rich with new beginnings; small, precious fires that will keep us warm all winter long.

Stickfest 2012

Once again Stickfest was upon us, once again we had glorious weather, and once again the price of admission was one stick.

I changed up the design of the poster this year, opting for something a little thinner to better fit among the multitudes of other posters on bulletin boards around the County.

As always, the main feature of our festival is our Museum of the Stick which looks better and better (and is more impressive) each year as new exhibits get added and old exhibits get replaced or refreshed.

Most of the exhibits tend to be on the walls, freeing up space on the floor for the activity stations like the ever popular Paint-A-Stick. This year we added yarn to the mix for even more decorative possibilities.

Silhouettes: stick painter & sticky playlist on the stereo.

This year Krista read from "Stanley's Stick" by John Hegley and Neal Layton, while I had the privilege of reciting The Glory of the Stick by Stickfest's official Poet Laureate Colin Frizzell.

The audience is impressed.

Last year I set an unofficial world record for The Most Hickory Sticks in the Mouth. That record was 93 Hickory Sticks and you can tell by the photos that I was getting quite uncomfortable by the end because of the light I decided to stand under. Plus the whole gag reflex thing. It was cooler this year so standing under the hot light wasn't a problem and, with the assembled crowd counting each stick, I managed to break my record and insert 101 Hickory Sticks in my mouth before giving in.

Here's Bay Woodyard from Honey Pie Hives and Herbals with her yarn bombing project. While technically not stick-related, Bay demonstrated a technique others did implement with their various sticks.

This year we had our first canine visitor for the event, Flicker, courtesy of the Wiens family. In fact, I'm pretty sure he appeared in Carl's awesome poster he created for our first Stickfest in 2010.

Of course, Flicker had to demonstrate the age-old relationship between dog and stick by fetching a few. Good boy.

SPECIAL EVENT

About a month or so ago, we got a call from a woman who wanted to celebrate her birthday with her friends in a unique way. Her favourite movie being The Wizard of Oz, she wanted to know if she could come by with a group of her friends and create some scarecrows. Since we were already prepping for this year's Scarecrow Festival (read about last year's event here), we had no problem accommodating her birthday plans.

Proceeds from this year's Scarecrow Festival will go to Puppets Without Borders, with the event taking place October 6 & 7 2012, from 11 AM to 5 PM.

The partyers - costumed like characters from The Wizard of Oz - began their creations enthusiastically and without hesitation.

Dressing a scarecrow can sometimes be as challenging as dressing an unwilling child (or a drunken adult), but it's always worth the effort and concentration.

Fun with the straw.
Big thanks again to George Emlaw for donating the straw!

This one seemed to be missing something...

...so she got some augmentation.

Can you pick out your scarecrow from this lineup?

The finished scarecrows and their proud creators.
A good time was had by all!

Thanks to everyone who came out to Stickfest this year and made it so much fun. The Stick Museum will be open until Halloween if you want to come by and check it out. We welcome your contributions to the Stick Museum and ideas for future Stickfests, and we're happy to provide a venue for your creative events.