Fish Lake Art Residency

One July morning, I hopped into a fixed wing airplane outside Missoula, Montana. Forty minutes later the plane flew away and I was left standing in a grassy field at the Fish Lake Guard Station and backcountry airstrip in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. The art residency program was a partnership between Open AIR, The Selway Bitterroot Frank Church Foundation, and The U.S. Forest Service.

Here is a link to a blog post about the residency experience on the Selway Bitterroot Frank Church Foundation website.

As soon as I unloaded the gear into the cabin, I immediately began walking and photographing the place. I located the nearby trails, studied the flora. and explored all the nearby structures – the cabin, barn, and outhouse. There were two crosscut saws hanging on the cabin wall, one for a single operator and another meant for two, each where about as tall as me. I was drawn to them because their design and size so eloquently corresponded to the intended task and the scale of the wilderness.

I made two cyanotypes with the saws, titled “The Foresters” and “The Harvester” after Bruegel’s “The Harvesters” because of the way the tree in the sixteenth-century painting gathers the composition, the people, and their activities into a mutually generative expression of culture and nature according to scholar, Tim Ingold. Here however, I focus on the tools. The two-handled, six-foot lance-tooth crosscut saw is a revelation of the camaraderie of wilderness work, while the single-handed saw with inlaid wildflowers suggest the solitary poetics of backcountry labor – hung up after a hard days work.

The overall experience of being an artist-in-residence at Fish Lake was profound and quiet. Lots of time to walk and think. Two times a day we had to check-in by radio with the US Forest Service Grangeville dispatch. As cabin volunteers, we worked around the cabin and monitored all the flights that landed at Fish Lake. I foraged and fished for wild foods, wrote and read most every day, hiked many miles around the region and made a few graphite rubbings of the wood map mounted to the exterior of the cabin.