Kim and I put the finishing touches on our crate, titled "A Prairie Project", this weekend for the Unpacked/Offset art exhibition which is now on display at the NIU Art Museum. The exhibition opened yesterday and the reception will be held tomorrow evening. Here are the before and after pictures of the packaging crate we used for our piece.
Half of the crate houses Prairie Smoke plants, the other half is a bench for rest, discussion, whatever one wishes. What isn't shown is the recycled cartons of water that were gathered during the last snowstorm to use for watering the plants. The observant listener will also note the bird songs playing from within the crate. Only birds that live in or migrate through Illinois are played. My favorite is the booming Greater Prairie Chicken, which has long been extirpated from the DeKalb countryside.
And here's Kim explaining "A Prairie Project" with a group of kids from the Land of Learning center.
Half of the crate houses Prairie Smoke plants, the other half is a bench for rest, discussion, whatever one wishes. What isn't shown is the recycled cartons of water that were gathered during the last snowstorm to use for watering the plants. The observant listener will also note the bird songs playing from within the crate. Only birds that live in or migrate through Illinois are played. My favorite is the booming Greater Prairie Chicken, which has long been extirpated from the DeKalb countryside.
And here's Kim explaining "A Prairie Project" with a group of kids from the Land of Learning center.
Here's our artist statement:
A Prairie Project
Kim and Derek Strom
We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.
-Aldo Leopold
Today, less than 0.1% of the original Illinois Tallgrass Prairie exists. That which remains is generally degraded and compartmentalized within small, marginalized parcels of land.
This crate temporarily holds fifteen containers of Prairie Smoke,* sustained by rainwater throughout the duration of the exhibition, which will be transferred as the beginning of a restoration project. Along with twenty pounds of seed composed of over forty grasses and forbs, these plants will parent a modest "Prairie Project" reclaiming sixty acres in Kane County beginning with a two acre section. Currently farmed for corn and soybeans, the land of the family farm is included in an agricultural easement, one of few in the state of Illinois, protected from any future development.
The project recalls a distant Midwestern ecology, before the processes of farming, paving, and developing sprawled disproportionately towards irreversibility. It references the fragmented aspect of our current concept of nature, but seeks to provide a hope for long-term environmental change through an extended understanding of community which includes consideration of a land ethic.
*Prairie Smoke (Geum Triflorum) is a native prairie forb valued by Native Americans for making tea from its roots, washes for eyes and sore throats, and soaks for muscle aches, as well as perfumes from grinding its seeds.
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