Overlook Field School 2018: Maintenance

O V E R L O O K F I E L D S C H O O L 2 0 18

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MAINTENANCE Viewed broadly, maintenance reflects humanity’s relationship to the natural world -it is a physical manifestation of that relationship.

The terms of that relationship are culturally contingent, driven by a region’s demographic needs, available natural resources, and technological capacities, among other things. At various historical moments, civilizations have asked the same question are we part of nature or are we above it?

— and arrived at radically different conclusions.

Since the European Renaissance, an ideology of separatism has prevailed. In the post-war era, in light of mounting environmental trauma, a view of nature as something with autonomy and value independent of its relationship to humans has gained popularity in discourses from philosophy to landscape architecture.

- Parker Sutton and Katherine Jenkins Resident Artist Instructors: Katherine Jenkins Parker Sutton Overlook Field School Program Manager Liska Chan

All photographs, unless otherwise noted, are by Parker Sutton and Katherine Jenkins 3

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THE CIRCLE ALL STUDENT COLLABORATION | lawn mower, shovel, hoe, weed-eater + rake Today, the spatial and temporal scales of maintenance are such that its impact is difficult to measure-occurring not only across seasons, but over decades and centuries. It is such that we often don’t know what to attribute to maintenance or to natural forces. As philosopher Timothy Morton might say, maintenance is massively distributed. Thus, it can be difficult to perceive where-and when-maintenance starts and ends.

The Circle installations occupy a 314 square-foot area, engaging with the topic of maintenance in three critical ways: a word, action and tool. Each of the groups selected one specialty tool to aid in the extraction of materials for installation, or in the formation of its appearance. This project allows each group to experience the challenges and rewards of a large-scale site installation. It is both an exercise in 1:1 site construction driven by logistical and material concerns, and conceptual abstraction. Installations may deal with the theme of maintenance via an explicit translation of maintenance practices, or explore maintenance as a metaphor. Implementation of the installations range from process driven, wherein the final form is aleatoric, or uncertain, and compositionally motivated, wherein the ultimate appearance of the piece is predetermined.

- Katherine Jenkins and Parker Sutton

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THE CIRCLE COMPOSED WORD + ACTION + TOOL | Emma Hershey + Nick Sund + Shasta Meehan + Hannah Six Strata are layers of earthly material. The word strata means “something spread or laid down.” Volcanic strata spread by migrating tectonic plates. Biotic strata laid down by plants and animals, spread by wind and water. A shovel exposes these layers by cutting through plants, roots, and soil, removing them, and depositing them elsewhere. In this way, the shovel also creates new layers of material, but not like the original strata—spread and laid out. Rather, the shovel creates concentrated piles. These piles may be an unsorted conglomerate of materials. If the work is to clear a site for something else, the removed strata are merely waste. If the work is extractive, then the components are sorted and separated from one another for other uses. Stone and soil are limited materials. In contrast, biotic strata, such as roots, wood, and plants, continue to regrow above and below the soil. Piles derived from maintenance continue to grow.

In either case, piles are deposited away from their source and out of mind, as is the case of the deposit piles at Overlook. By keeping the piles on site we juxtapose the two realities and bring awareness to these “waste products” and “resources.” While the shovel disrupts existing strata, natural processes continue to replenish and create new layers, like leaves accumulating on preceding strata, filling holes. New material is to be dug, to create new piles.

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THE CIRCLE COMPOSED WORD + ACTION + TOOL | Zoe Walker-Aparicio + Summer Young + Tommy Chen + Shelbi Stagi We are creatures of cultivation. We alter the environment around us to create order. We seek to create spaces that suit our needs but also our desire for beauty. Active cultivation grapples with opportunities held in landscape memory and existing site conditions. Here we’ve embraced the objective of cultivation through the act of weaving, binding landscape past and potential into a cohesive piece.

Stone, fern and soil are gathered and manipulated through our tool of choice: a binder and breaker - the hoe. The hoe unearths the rock, and the hand cultivates landscape form and functionality through labor. Labor is the hurdle, that yields the reward. The earth turned in the process of collection bears the potential to cultivate life, of which the bounds cannot necessarily be anticipated.

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THE CIRCLE COMPOSED WORD + ACTION + TOOL | Rebecca Cruz + Victor Garcia + Peyton Johnson This work sought to uncover the invisibility of maintenance workers and maintenance practices. Our group chose invisibility as our word of inspiration to enunciate the invisibility of maintenance workers. We chose the leafblower as our tool to channel the mysticism that encapsulates maintenance. We value landscapes that appear maintained often without any visual signal of the people whose hands collectively craft these landscapes.

Weaving a moss path through the center of the circle, we urged viewers and passerbys to enter into the circle, an interactive aspect that we valued as a group. By breaking the border of the circle, visitors can enjoy the installation from multiple perspectives, and feel welcomed to interact . Twigs tied with fishing wire hang over head, hinting at the motion of being blown up, uncovered by wind or the leaf blowers power. The installation offers an awareness of the surrounding environmental influences, such as the consistency or changes in light, weather, and time of day or season.

The structural arrangement of the twigs encapsulate the viewer as they walk along the path, demanding mindfulness as not to walk into the floating and moving debris.

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EQUINE AERATOR Victor Garcia | MLA The site for this soil aerator is located next to the barn. The area, once an outdoor horse arena, is now marked by circular fence posts and a gate. Within this space, riders and their horses once left behind impressions in the ground. Over time the horse shoe imprints have slowly faded away, leaving only the coral’s structural bones. Today, a maintained lawn of green grass fills the space.

The ends of my tool mimic the shape of a horseshoe. The slender dowels that poke out at both ends are made to scrape and puncture the soil, leaving behind new impressions: pockets in which meadow seedlings can germinate. Thus, the tool retraces the history of a place that was once highly active while slowly transforming it into a new landscape.

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WHEN PIGS PLANT Hannah Six | MLA When pigs plant, the landscape is left in a strengthened state with future soil-scape in mind. Current farm practices rotate pigs across the woodland leaving a site behind to be seeded and requiring a commitment of farm labor to encourage desirable species over invasive ones. This prototype employs pigs to have a hand (or a hip) in land stewardship. Pig manure adds nutrients to the soil and their snouts aerate, till, and clear fine vegetation as they rummage. Pigs generate highly fertile and disturbed soil conditions, ideal for invasive plant species to colonize, outcompeting natives. Soilscapes are heavily impacted by pigs. Pigs are known to disrupt: surface vegetation, decomposer species, plant species richness, macroinvertebrates, root material and rhizome composition. Prompting the curation of desired vegetation is among the many steps toward rebuilding soil complexity; this provides habitat and food sources to support a diversity of organisms. The Seeder prompts resilient vegetative development. The base structure acts as an exaggerated tree bark for pigs to scratch their bodies upon. The movement generated by the pigs engages the seeds above. Seeds are dispersed into the local area, and additionally, adhere to pigs’ bodies to be transported across the site. Lost energy is repurposed, captured toward re-generating a resilient landscape.

Pigs’ role in the landscape is altered to be more cyclical with the addition of the Seeder. Pigs are now engaged in closing the loop between soil remediation and seeding, building land resiliency and relieving pressures on farmers to reseed after the pigs are moved. The scope of the problem includes multiple organisms; thus it requires multiple solutions. The seeder opens up further research to assist farmers in adapting additional practices committed to a rich soilscape riddled with organisms.

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UNDERSTORY MEADOW RAKE Shelby Stagi | MLA Here at Overlook, the meadow left to its own devices is on a successional trajectory toward hardwood forest. Yet, the meadows here are maintained by regular mowing, maybe twice annually, which means weeks of missing the aesthetically rich interplay between wind and tall waves of grass . The understory meadow rake was designed with the intention of extending the beauty of the shady understory meadow into autumn. The tall open form of the meadow rake allows for collection of fallen leaves and other debris while the undergrowth remains undisturbed. The small horizontal prongs reach in between the drying perennials, collecting and combing as the grasses and seed heads bob between the vertical rungs of the rake. The simple material palette of wooden dowels and twine dialogs with the meadow textures further enhancing the pastoral aesthetic experience.

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WILLOW BARREL Nick Sund | MLA The landscape is a rich tapestry of different materials laid down and spread about by natural processes. Leaves fall and build layers of soil. Wind and water work tirelessly to erode and spread it all out again. Migrating birds spread seeds across regions as migrating continents move minerals from one side of the planet to the other.

The human species has contributed to this drama with its unique tendency to sort and organize the landscape. Resource materials (such as sand, gravel, or coal) are excavated, transported, and deposited in piles. Humans do the same with their waste, whether an innocuous brush pile like ours at Overlook or a landfill for Lackawanna County.

The willow-barrel is a new take on a familiar maintenance tool that allows a new kind of interaction with the landscape— not by moving and sorting but by spreading and accumulation. Made from branches of the willow tree, its woven structure mimics the rich tapestry of our landscape. The material it contains reacts to each small bump, each stone or tree root in the path. The fallen debris traces our movement through the landscape—gradually accumulating like leaves in a forest—transforming it, hopefully for the better.

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SEED DRILL Tommy Chen | BLA This is a seed drill, which has two wheels on both ends of a three and a half foot long cylinder, two inches diameter, with over 40 spikes of different sizes. The earliest seed drill known can be traced back to second century BCE in China.

This straight seed drill was pulled by oxen in early agriculture. As I have a Chinese background, I decided to make a non-conventional seed hole drill for irregular planting in planting beds. At the Overlook farm, the cutting garden caught my attention. The beautiful, rectilinear, and well-maintained garden located behind the barn, is designed within four large beds, framed in wood, and planted with various plant species in an orderly manner. Yet walking this property, one encounters several beautiful meadows consisting of hundreds of species of plants. Creating a non-conventional seed drill for this space will help create a garden with a wild meadow appearance. Designed especially for a planting bed constructed above ground, the seed drill allows the gardener to hold onto both ends of the tool and roll it to create seed holes of various depths for different plants.

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Photo by Chris Weaver

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SEED CORES Rebecca Cruze | BLA These vessels contain seeds, berries, and plant material collected from the Lower Meadow of the Overlook property. The cores stand in the meadow as both a record of the seeds collected from past years and a seed bank for future growth.

The intention of seed saving is to protect and preserve the heritage of plants used by our ancestors and to educate future generations about the practices and plants which have been pivotal in our development and livelihood.

Knowledge of past landscape maintenance is woven within the act of seed saving by saving seed, those who maintain the landscape connect to a network of time and stewardship.

These cores are placed within the meadow allowing visitors the opportunity to see which seeds make up their surrounding environment. In their passive state, the seeds become sculpture, but in times of stress, the seeds become vital in maintaining the site’s diversity.

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SLOPE COMB Emma Hershey | BLA Rakes and brooms remove material from surfaces. In removing material we attempt to make surfaces “clean” or “neat.”

However, in removing organic matter, such as leaves and clippings, from mown landscapes in particular, we also remove insect habitat and soil nutrients from those landscapes, and thus we impact future ecologies. Organic matter is valued differently depending on its site context: it is necessary for forests while unwanted in meadows, as it aids succession. The slope comb considers using organic matter and other materials strategically to influence ecological systems.

The slope comb combines the rake and broom to perform a second layer of maintenance following mowing regimes.

It removes some materials while leaving others, promoting further investigation of mowing’s ecological potential.

Designed specifically for slopes, the slope comb’s curvature complements topographic variations in the vast lawns and meadows of Overlook. Three brush coarseness levels allow for three intensities of removal regimes, which can stand alone or be combined in a sequence to create several different layers of removal. Together, they produce landscape patterns.

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BODY COMB Peyton johnson | BLA The ghillie suit commonly refers to military camouflage but it originated as a “portable blind” for deer hunting often made of netting, rope, and natural materials. Does the cloak wearer become the hunter or the hunted in this disguise crafted from sewn grass and burlap intended to mimic tick habitat?

This project seeks to create a shield from ticks while also connecting to the ghillie suit’s traditional history in deer hunting. The cloak is sealed with a wooden button that speaks to the graphic mark one develops when infected by a tick bite and also to the target of a shotgun. When cloaked in this tick armor, one is free to roam in tall grass. She takes on the appearance of the meadow, blending in; at once exposed to and protected from disease.

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MIRRORED SCYTHE Shasta Meehan | BLA A scythe is an agrarian hand tool used for the cutting or harvesting of grass and grain. Traditionally, the shaft of a scythe spans the width of the human body with a blade that arches outwards. My interpretation of the scythe is even broader with a “blade” that sweeps towards the operator in a circular procession. This circular form addresses the character of the landscape at Overlook, where unmown fields appear in narrow drifts along fences and beneath trees. The operator is within the scythe while also beside it as the tool is moved through a drift. The use of mirrors as a blade present the operator with the many participants of the scene, including the sky, the field, and an image of themselves in the reflection. The scythe involves the operator in the act of the harvest while also within the greater landscape. It speculates that a harvest is not linear but cyclical. Seasons change and the landscape fluctuates between production and rest, the operator proceeding within and beside it.

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EGG APRON Zoe Walker-Aparicio | BLA The act of keeping livestock has evolved to become industrialized, causing us to become disconnected from the maintenance regimes of nurturing, harvesting, and consumption. The egg apron allows us to engage in this process by treating each egg individually. Bringing the eggs to our body and attaching them to our body makes them, as well as ourselves, more vulnerable. This regime asks us to become more conscious of our movements and our process while the accessories on the apron let us interact with the chickens in ways that large scale industry no longer permits.

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NATURAL SELECTION Summer Young | BLA Very little greenery in this world is truly left to its own devices. Despite the robust native flowers peppering the lush meadow at the crest of Overlook, a past of heavy cultivation and contemporary treatments such as herbicide use and tillage practices have made this naturalistic landscape possible. Small customized greenhouse structures—reminiscent of both Victorian times and contemporary maintenance practices observed in conservatories and elite pleasure gardens—accent the extremes one might go to in order to maintain an Eden-esque setting. Such practices could avail themselves in an alternative reality, but more likely in a future of rapidly changing climates and sudden onslaughts of invasive pests. In order to conserve in extreme cases, one must separate and choose plants shrewdly, ultimately decontextualizing the individual specimen from the whole. Thus, the plant becomes an alien in its home landscape instead of adapting by accelerated evolution or falling prey to premature extinction. Though there are loses, the plant gains rigidity as well as artificial stasis under the canopy of human touch.

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Fuller Center for Productive Landscapes Department of Landscape Architecture University of Oregon landarch.uoregon.edu fuller.uoregon.edu 2018