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THE GREAT STUMP

The Great Stump (2024) is a portable encounter installation. I created it as my contribution to 2024's Scarboro Bowl after my first experience at Hulaween. Having developed an approach to installation via modularity in The Portal, I  moved to a freestanding structure that creates its own sense of place within whatever setting it is situated. After designing a PVC-based armature panel set that can be quickly linked and unlinked, I designed an inner-and-outer skin approach to building a thematically consistent fantasy of a tree stump of nearly impossible dimensions. The inner sanctuary is 10 feet in diameter, and the outer spread about 15 feet, with a height at the tallest point at about 10 feet. It is realistically painted in colors matched to the surrounding forest. It also glows with hundreds of fiber optic filament elements connected to programmable LED lights. The interior panels also hold cubbies for lights, interactive features, or tiny compositions.

At Scarboro, the stump also served as a projection screen for projection artists. The cubbies were filled with strange items like those found in a cabinet of curiosities: vials, skulls, and talismans. In its tour at Bombyx, the "opening" was a community ritual I led called Earth Grief, where participants tucked messages of apology into the cubbies of the tree. The tree also held hidden speakers which played selections from cellist and composer Eden Rayz' climate-rage-themed albumCorpus Vice. The Great Stump is on display at Bombyx from July 27 to August 15, 2024.

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Tender Fire Studio is part concept, part my tiny basement apartment full of art supplies and very little furniture, and part shared workshop. I work, play, and love on land that was stolen from the Pocumtuc people, settled by colonizers, and continues to be sold for profit in the speculative real estate market for the enrichment and comfort of the owning class. Decolonizing my practice is an ongoing study of how I can be in right relationship to the land, animals, and plants of this place while embracing and acknowledging the often-scary precarity and vulnerability of a life given to the pursuit of soul and the sacred rather than the settler concepts of security and safety. I give thanks and praise to the rivers that form this Connecticut River valley, to these sand hills and the ants that dwell here and find my kitchen window so inviting, to the many birds and their dawn hymns, and to the forests: o the trees, the ferns, the damp stones and the deep deep woods, you are the mercy of the sacred in cellulose flesh.


Tender Fire Studio  @tenderfirestudio
tenderfirestudio@gmail.com
PO BOX 9359, North Amherst, MA 01059

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