Before this month ends tomorrow I want to report on the fascinating interactive performance event called The Land and Me which was held at the DeTurk Round Barn on March 2. It was an opportunity for us to have the first public showing of our entire body of fire story sketches (120 in all!) at an interactive event, created by artists, musicians, dancers and thinkers! It featured live music, dance, poetry and participatory performance, all packed into about two hours.
If you haven’t been to the DeTurk Barn, it’s a real gem owned by the city and rented out for events. It’s not out in the country as you might expect, but in a small park near Western Farm Supply just west of Hwy 101 in Santa Rosa.
To give you a feeling of the inside of the barn, here’s a panoramic shot I took with my iPhone! We were all standing around the balcony calling out lines of poetry and releasing the slips of paper to float leaf-like down to the first level.
Carole, Bettina and I came early to install our show called Sketching Fire Stories: Artists are Second Responders. The sketches date back to right after the devastating firestorms of October 2017 when we dedicated our skills as visual journalists to telling the stories of the people, places and events that so severely impacted our community. Rather than use a camera, we traveled to many of the affected sites armed with our pens and watercolors and sketchbooks to record our impressions of the scenes and personal stories. Other artists joined us and we later archived the sketch stories in a body of work to be shown to the community in various venues.
The Land and Me project, designed by two gifted Bay Area artists, Carol Mancke and Trena Noval, afforded an opportunity to share the project and talk to interested people about it. We hung the sketches on clips on the round walls of the barn and had binders of more sketches on tables for viewing. Some people spent time looking at each of the hundred or so sketches and took pictures. . .like this Press Democrat reporter who quietly snapped dozens of pictures.
We were glad to represent the impact of the firestorms on the land and people of our community for the Land and Me project. It was and is our heart-felt offering for the healing and rebuilding of our community.
The event featured multiple layers of activities and artistic expressions.
You can get a glimpse here of the range of activities at the event. (If you can’t see the slideshow, try this link)
For more information about the project and the contributing artists visit the Facebook page.
And if you’d like an opportunity to view the Fire Sketches, we will be presenting them again in August in a six-week show downtown Santa Rosa sponsored by the S.F. Parks and Rec Dept. More on that closer to the date.
You can also view some of my firestorm sketches on my website and Carole Flaherty’s on her website. As well you can see sketches from the events surrounding the first year anniversary of the fires, Sketching Fire Stories.
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