Tracing the Field of Wonder

This project is part of the rotating window gallery solo installations on the occasion of the (stillness) collective’s 534 gallery exhibition.

A project in the window on occasion of the Lunar New Year featuring video, photographs, sculptural ephemera and prose by Susan Bickford.

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.