Bodies of Weather

the (stillness) collective are a place-based, interdisciplinary, and improvisational collaborative practicing deep listening and intensive making in nature. They offer work toward kinship with human and more than human partners wherever they find ourselves. In June of 2023, the group gathered to research near Popham Beach and to collaboratively create Bodies of Weather. The collective will present a new multi-channel video installation with sound and other works.

This year’s iteration of the (stillness) collective features contributions by Annie Bailey, Fletcher Boote, Susan Bickford, Katherine Ferrier, Robin Lane, Heather Lyon, and Luke Myers.

the (stillness) collective is a group that has been gathering and making work in nature since 2015. The collective arrives, we make agreements, and together we listen to place. The group slow into, attune to, attend to, and are directed by what happens. They recognize that we exist within a society and culture whose foundation is built on systems of oppression. The collective practices ongoing relationship, interrelatedness, deep listening, generosity, gratitude, kindness, and slowness in service to the dismantling of that oppression. They offer their work toward a vision of reciprocity.

This collaborative project’s presentation is joined by popup solo presentations by collective members in the SPACE window gallery through Sunday, March 17th.

February 2nd’s First Friday Art Walk from 5-8 pm will be accompanied by performances. On Friday, February 9th, join the collective for a New Moon Astrology Reading with Andrea Goodman, with a gesture drawing of the chart by Susan Bickford accompanied by a live performance by Robin Lane on cello. March 1st’s First Friday Art Walk will also include performances TBA and an artist talk by collective members from 7-8 pm.

Annie Bailey is a visual artist from Midcoast Maine. Her work is influenced by the maritime culture she grew up in, concepts of playfulness, authenticity, and a sense of place. Her work celebrates the range of one’s creative potential, from control to chaos. Bailey is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA, 2010). She studied painting with Ronald Frontin, ceramics at The Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, painting at the Rome Art Program, and video and animation at Maine Media Workshops. Her work has been exhibited at National Geographic, The Society of Illustrators, The Farnsworth Art Museum, The Maine Maritime Museum, Speedwell Gallery, BandH Photo, The Steel House, Bunnell Street Art Center in Homer Alaska, Rockland Shorts International Film Festival, The Caldbeck Gallery, Joseph Fiore Art Center, The Steel House Gallery, The Charles Danforth Gallery, The North Haven Gallery, River Arts Gallery, Bunnell Street Art Center, The Maine Lighthouse Museum and The Strand Theater. She has taught art classes and workshops for the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, The Farnsworth Art Museum, The Steel House, Watershed High School, and ArtsInAction RSU13. She co-founded the NoRo Art Gallery with Peter Davis in 2016 and was exhibit coordinator and gallery manager 2016-2018.

Susan Bickford is the founding artist and organizer of “the (stillness) project”, a place based collaborative interdisciplinary intensive which results in many forms. Working within the tenants of deep ecology, radical hospitality and transcendentalism, this work fosters a spiritual connection in nature. In its 8th year the project has become a true collaborative effort with the formation of the (stillness) collective, and exists as an annual intensive, video installations, sculptural ephemera, live performance and still photographs. The work has been exhibited at the Maine International Film Festival, SPEEDWELL Projects and the Yarmouth Historical Society, with an upcoming exhibition at SPACE Gallery in 2024. Bickford crafts aesthetic experience in nature combining her skills as an artist in performance, video and installation with her skills as an environmental educator and Forest Therapy guide. She straddles the art world and natural world by offering walks at various Nature Conservancies, the The Picnic Pavilion during the Venice Biennale, at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Maine and the Stanley Whitman House in Farmington, Connecticut. Bickford won the Maine Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship for Media and Performance in 2017. She holds a BFA/BID from the Rhode Island School of Design (1985/86) and an MFA from Maine College of Art (2001), A Guide Certificate from The Association of Forest Therapy Guides and Programs (2017), and A Shamanic Practitioner certificate from Spirit Passages (1995). Bickford is currently a student of Astrology and Qigong and has been teaching art at The University of Maine at Augusta since 2003.

Fletcher Boote is an artist, vocalist and healer exploring the sensual nuances and sonic embodiments of our evolution as part of a multispecies organism. Her work emphasizes community engagement, chance composition and experimentation. Her projects are often initially realized as a visual score: a set of drawings, objects or instructions that then take form as arrangements of sound, image, installation and ritual. She holds an MFA from University of the Arts, London, in performance and a BA from Bard College. She is a certified yoga instructor and leads a weekly sound bath and 1:1 sound healing sessions as part of her interdisciplinary practice. Fletcher has performed all over Europe, UK at large-scale venues and festivals and had the distinct honor of sharing the bill with headliners such as DEVO and Laurie Anderson. She is a co-creator and leader of ceremonies at a bi-yearly women’s medicine retreat 10 years running.

Katherine Ferrier is a queer poet, teacher, and multi-disciplinary artist based in Rockland, Maine. Her research grows out of a deep practice of paying poetic attention to the world, and lives in the intersecting communities of movers, makers, writers and activists. Her spontaneous typewriter poetry practice has been featured twice in The Knot, and her writing has been featured in Uppercase Magazine, Contact Quarterly, and several poetry anthologies, including A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis, published by Littoral Books, and a self-published collection of photographs and poems about making, called Thread Says Stay. She was the Poet-in-Residence at The Press Hotel from 2018-2021, writing custom poems on the spot for guests on one of her vintage typewriters. She has become a regular feature in the arts, non-profit and humanitarian sectors, writing poems at numerous fundraising and networking events throughout southern and mid-coast Maine. She has recently shown her work at The Ice House Gallery on North Haven, The Buoy Gallery in Kittery, and Speedwell Projects and Cove Street Arts in Portland. Since 2018, she has been the Director of the Medomak Fiberarts Retreat, a nationally recognized gathering of fiber artists from around the world, where she teaches patchwork, slow stitching, wet felting, and writing for makers. She believes in patchwork as the radical practice of being patient, saying yes, and making space for everyone at the table.

Robin Lane’s passion for music ignited at a young age when he began playing the cello, studying through both the Farmington Public Schools and The Hartt School of Music at the University of Hartford. Lane currently attends the University of Southern Maine where he is pursuing a Bachelor of Music in Performance with a concentration in composition. Lane performs classical, jazz, and contemporary works for public events, private events, and weddings throughout New England.  Notable performance venues include Camden International Film Festival, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, One Longfellow Square, and Maine Yoga Festival. In addition to performing, Lane records, engineers, and produces his own music, along with the music of a growing number of local musicians, out of his studio, Robin’s Nest Recording in Rockland.

Heather Lyon is a performance, video and installation artist, educator and mother from Blue Hill, Maine. Her work is a visual and movement-based inquiry into the miraculous. She uses site-responsive performance, video and installation work to investigate the inter-weaving of relationships through gestures of coded communication and embodiment practices. She holds both a BFA and MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Selected exhibitions and performances include deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts; Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland; SPACE Gallery, Portland; IMRC Center, University of Maine Orono; Cynthia Winings Gallery, BlueHill; Zaratan, Lisbon, Portugal; “The Picnic Pavilion” Venice, Italy; The State Silk Museum, Tbilisi, Georgia and Lichtenberg Studios in der Museums-Lounge, Berlin, Germany. She has received grants from the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Kindling Fund (the Andy Warhol Foundation regranting program distributed by SPACE Gallery).

Luke Myers is a sculptor and multi-disciplinary artist who fuses scientific methodologies and technology with natural materials and concerns. His practice investigates the possibility of rebuilding empathetic connections to the natural world, in response to the disasters of anthropocentrism. He is working on a series of “Artifacts of Uncertain Temporality”, taking as a starting point the idea that the far future and distant past are colliding in our present, presenting exciting opportunities for objects and artists. Recently, he designed and built a medium format film camera, and has begun integrating photography into his expanding practice. Luke earned his BA in studio arts from the University of Maine at Augusta in 2018, and an MFA from the University of South Florida in 2021. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Science and Industry and the USF Contemporary Art Museum in Florida, the Art Pavilion in London, the Arsenale in Venice, ARC Cinema in Canberra, Australia, and in galleries throughout his home state of Maine, USA. His work is held in the public collections of University of Maine Augusta, and the Waldoboro, Maine Public Library.