Second Spring

This month we are celebrating the first anniversary of Small Pond Arts, and our second spring on the farm. When I look back on the past year, it is with surreal amazement that I take stock of all that we’ve accomplished. There is a confidence that comes with embarking on year two; there is a little less guesswork, a little less re-inventing the wheel.

I’m not going to lie, our first winter here was LONG, even though we went away for five weeks! Our 150-year old farmhouse is (not surprisingly) poorly insulated and drafty, and I wore a toque 24/7 from November through April. I missed the constant flow of friends and visitors, and had to mentally adjust to the solitude that comes with living in a seasonal community in the off-season. Of course this solitude has its benefits. Milé and I have both been incredibly productive, and have had the time to focus on our artistic pursuits. We seem to live a life of extremes; with the dawning of May we bid adieu to free time and embrace the madness of the busy season. There’s already been a steady stream of visitors, and the constantly-needing-to-be-cut grass reminds me that there won’t be much rest now until the fall when the cooler temperatures return.

Spring at Small Pond is nothing short of glorious. The flowers are coming up, the frogs are singing, the birds are building their nests, the rhubarb is daily doubling in size. It’s easy to be optimistic.

Although we’ve been hard at work over the past weeks, this spring the pace is a little less frenzied. Between the frequent rain showers, I’ve been spending a lot of time outside. I’ve continued hauling junk out of the woods, and have been arranging rocks and fallen logs to help give shape the Clearing and the Artists’ Trail.

I uncovered this cool stone wall, which turned out to be under several feet of dirt at the base of the old barn floor:

A few weeks ago some gale-force winds tore through the County, toppling our rather large and substantial outhouse.

The first step in raising an outhouse is acknowledging that it is tipped over.

This occasion called for an impromptu “outhouse raising party” – and we had plenty of friends show up to help us get the outhouse back in place.

Here we celebrate our achievement.  Can you spot the puppet?

Over the winter months I’ve been reading a lot about food, and our pitifully dysfunctional modern food system. On July 24 we’re giving artists and community members the opportunity to express their own thoughts and feelings about food with Cornography, an afternoon of art featuring more than 40 participants.

Milé is also on the cusp of launching a food-related art show, Field to Canvas, a series of portraits of local farmers. I’ve been watching him paint these portraits for more than four months now, and they really are a homage to the people who grow our food. With fresh, organic, REAL food on our minds, this spring we doubled the size of our garden. We just finished building the fence around it, and the first veggies went in yesterday, with LOTS more to come.



Milé rototills the garden

In June we’ll be building an outdoor cob bake oven, inspired by my time with Bread & Puppet Theater and four years of working in Dufferin Grove Park with Clay & Paper Theatre. Not only are bake ovens a great symbol of community, this project is also helping us move toward sustainability by allowing us to bake without using electricity.

In August, the shadow puppets will return to Small Pond, with three performances of Doubt Seed and our new show, The History of Shadows. I can’t wait to have my amazing crew of collaborators back here at the farm so we can do it all over again!

We’ve got lots of residents booking their summer stays with us. I love meeting new people, and can’t wait to welcome this year’s resident artists (the first of the season arrive today!). There are still plenty of spots left, but if you are thinking of a residency this summer, you should think about contacting us sooner than later.

We have come so far, yet in many ways we are still at the beginning. We have so many things we want to accomplish and improve upon, and there are so many surprises around the corner. Who will we meet? What crazy projects will we dream up? If I had a crystal ball, I would throw it into the woods. I prefer to be surprised.

Finally, a huge thank-you to everyone who has helped us make Small Pond the dream come true! Friends and family, you have been capital-a Amazing, and we couldn’t have done it without you. Come visit us soon so we can show our appreciation in person!

PS - 'Like' our new page on Facebook by June 1, 2011, and you'll get a chance to win a one week artist residency with us!  Just click HERE

Short and Sweet

Last weekend Milé and I performed our first puppet show together.  I've done a number of puppet shows with other people, but after seven years together, we are now officially a couple of puppeteers.  Life and love can be full of surprises, and I'm so lucky to have a partner willing to embrace the weird world of puppetry with me.  The piece was called Short and Sweet and was presented as part of Maple in the County, Prince Edward County's annual maple syrup festival.

Milé hard at work on character design

I wrote the script for Short and Sweet while we were in Arizona. The play's diminutive heroine, Theodora, must rescue spring from the evil hands of The Creeper, defeating a perpetual winter and ensuring the return of the all-important maple syrup. The design of the show mixes several theatre and puppetry techniques. I call it a ‘suitcase show’ – although there are technically no suitcases involved, just two antique wooden boxes. The boxes sit atop an old wooden ironing board, and contain the entire show.  We think the "old-timey" vibe of our props goes well with puppetry.  Banners unfurl from the boxes, bearing titles and painted backdrops.

Our puppets are two-sided cardboard puppets on small sticks, the tops of the open boxes are their stage. Milé designed all of the characters and banners, and I helped him paint and colour them.

Our cast of zany characters

There is one three-dimensional puppet, the terrifying Creeper, which we built several years ago (the genesis of this puppet is chronicled in Milé’s blog). Milé did a great job of puppeteering him and probably gave more than one little kiddy nightmares (sorry about that).  The boxes are great for containing surprise elements, such as paper snow and leaves to be tossed in the air, and a small pair of cymbals which are used as aural punctuation. We had a great time performing for an attentive crowd of kids both young and old.

Milé spent the rest of the day stiltwalking and rescuing helium balloons stranded on the ceiling.



Meanwhile I was papier-mâchéing a giant puppet head with a bunch of kids. We had a lot of fun, evidenced by the river of glue flowing from the table. 

Milé and I had sculpted the head in advance, using cardboard and one of my favourite tools,“the creech,” a.k.a. staple pliers; a few features were made from wrapping masking tape around bundles of stuffing.

Pre-mâché sculpture

Milé sketched a picture showing what the final puppet will look like. His name is “Shack,” and he’s supposed to be a sugar shack worker. Yet everybody seems to think this is just another portrait puppet of Milé… what do you think?

We had a chance to perform Short and Sweet a second time this past week, at a Picton fundraiser for victims of the Japan earthquake and tsunami. If you want to do something REALLY sweet, you can make a donation via the Red Cross; all you have to do is click HERE.

Vaporators

“My fake plants died because I did not pretend to water them.”
– Mitch Hedberg

As I’ve mentioned before, we depend on our well for our in-house water so, to help conserve this precious ground resource as much as possible, we've been collecting rainwater in barrels to use on the gardens and the flowers outdoors. But last summer at Small Pond was a really dry one: by August our rain barrels were no longer full of sky water, and by September we started getting concerned about how long our well would hold out. Luckily, the well didn’t run dry, but, clearly, we needed to supplement.

Hail the new (used) water collectors!

We asked around and it looked more and more like we should consider getting moisture vaporators, which are usually found in arid climates but work just fine (better, even) in climates like ours, which can get pretty humid in the summer. We eventually found six used GX-8 models on Kijiji that were just in our price range and, as our tests of the units proved, in perfect working condition. Aside from a little rust and some carbon scoring, they were as good as new.

Krista scrapes away at some carbon scoring.

I make some minor adjustments.

As far as the weather was concerned, March may not have been the best time to install these beasts (the ground was actually quite workable, albeit cold and muddy), but considering how busy we’ll be in April and May –not to mention this summer!—this was the best time for us, as far as our schedules were concerned. It only took us one day per unit to install, anyway. We decided to put them all in the Pasture to make it easier to gather the water and also to keep an eye on them when the strong winds blow in case the heavy, in-ground bases should fail.

The first three are up and running!

The GX-8s are very quiet and pretty self-sufficient, using solar panels to power the condensers in the outer bars. They’re like giant de-humidifiers.  The water that collects there is then filtered and funneled into a 60L holding tank near the bottom of the unit. That doesn’t sound like a lot of water compared to our rain barrels, but these things pull moisture right out of the air and can reach capacity in less than 24 hours, so we’ll have (at least!) 360L of cool, clean water every day –even if it doesn’t rain for weeks.

All six vaporators installed and
quietly humming in the Pasture.

Now all we need is a droid who can speak the binary language of moisture vaporators…