Anne Blackburn

PLACE

We had a saying, taken from a review of the LoFi environmental art festival in a local weekly paper: "Nature always wins."

In 2006, I was invited to show artwork as part of an arts festival at a place called Smoke Farm, a retired dairy farm north of Seattle with 360 acres of riverbank, pasture, blackberry bramble and forest. Owned by the Rubicon Foundation, the farm has a deceptively comprehensive mission to restore the habitat of the floodplain and build community through art and collaborative projects.

Succeeding years fostered an intimacy with that landscape and community, including my 2-year site-specific installation Shelf Fungus, which was eventually destroyed by a black bear cub; as well as becoming co-curator of the annual LoFi arts festival.

As a curator intimately acquainted with this specific landscape; it became my job to translate my understanding of the place to artists seeing it for the first time, to help them envision spring floods, fall salmon runs, and that 6” invasive pasture grass in May being 6’ tall in August.

Our goal was to conceptualize works in the vast space and vibrating "thereness" of a natural setting and ask artists to work with, not against, nature. 

COMMUNITY

At Smoke Farm, we told stories around the fire at night and led walks to the mysterious squatter’s cabin, the active beaver dam, and the old pear and cherry trees at the original homestead sites. We debated about the scat filled with cherry pits on the paths (Coyote? Black bear?) and spent lazy hours in the river during the day and watched the mist roll up from the river after dusk.

We put an entire musical cabaret, including the piano, in a big maple tree; hosted a hand-cranked, 60' bellows sculpture that blew air over salvaged pipe organ pipes and sounded like a freight train in the mist; staged plays that happened on pallet rafts floating down the river; elevated a performance artist who performed her nautical love poems with semaphore flags in a sea of grass; and hosted molecular gastronomy feasts in a treehouse that required finding the surly maitre d’ on a remote sandbar to secure a seat at the table.

The longest-lasting lesson, however, was exactly how much coming together at the end of every long day connected us as artists, volunteers, and collaborators and created fodder for the next idea. In the process I learned to cook for big groups, to create community through food, as savory fuel for conversation and connection, one of the essential languages of humanity.

SYNTHESIS

Falling in love with Place and Community began at Smoke Farm, and common meals and conversation fueled other collaborative projects.

We co-founded an artist social club, Canoe Social Club, which served as a base for a large swath of Seattle creatives and thinkers.

These opportunities led to coordinating the inventive urban activation project Storefronts Seattle, which placed art installations and pop-up projects in vacant real estate in the wake of the 2008 recession.

And all along I continued to create site-specific art installations with nature as my co-conspirator, giving a small creek on the polluted Duwamish river it’s own Instagram account featuring “selfies” of raccoons and otters caught by remote camera; or making invasive plant species out of trash and installing as guerilla art in waste places.

As a result I remain devoted to Place and the transformative possibilities and stories held in food, ecologies, and community.

Giving voice to the "there," there.