Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, 2006 Joint Artists’ Residency
THIS STRETCH OF RICHES
a set of seven books by
Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore Artists-in-Residence for 2006
Lucia Harrison & Sharon A. Sharp
In the early fall of 2006, I flew to Michigan to meet my friend and book-arts collaborator Lucia Harrison (of Olympia, Washington), so we could begin our joint artists’ residency at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. We had met several years earlier at Penland School of Crafts and collaborated long-distance on some projects, but this was our first onsite collaborative venture. We were especially excited about getting to work creatively in a national park.
For almost three weeks we lived in the historic Coast Guard Station at Grand Marais, where spectacular sunsets and sunrises often framed our days and lured us to Lake Superior’s stone-strewn beaches. We pored over maps and field guides before, during, and after our hikes and drives throughout the park’s long, narrow expanse. New to the Upper Peninsula, we were captivated by patterns in the park’s diverse habitats—its forests, dunes, wetlands, streams, waterfalls, lakes, beaches, and windswept cliffs. We took photographs and made extensive notes on those, and we wrote and sketched in journals. As we learned to identify native flora and fauna, our amazement grew at the variety of species that have adapted so well to the harsh conditions along Lake Superior. On a cruise near dusk, we saw how the lake has relentlessly carved the multihued Pictured Rocks cliffs, and as the cliffs’ glowing russets danced across the lake’s brilliant blue surface, we understood even more fully why this area had been set aside as the first national lakeshore.
As our explorations broadened, we began envisioning a set of books that would reflect the complexity and richness surrounding us. The park’s unique shape and astounding diversity, along with the winding routes for our hikes, inspired us to plan the long, stretched, undulating form of the Slinky-type book, All in Stride. We created more than forty original pieces of artwork, which were then converted into the archival inkjet prints filling All in Stride and forming the covers of the accompanying haiku books. In that collection of small books, our observations and musings fan out in accordion forms. We wanted each book and the set as a whole to convey a sense of unfolding, as with the park’s cycles of change and with our own growing appreciation. For This Stretch of Riches, we each created half of the artwork, Lucia scanned and printed the pages and crafted the box, and Sharon wrote the haiku and stitched the larger book.
Throughout our stay we were welcomed and looked after by park employees, park volunteers, and local schoolteachers. We remain deeply grateful to the PRNL staff and the National Park Service for the rare opportunity we had to explore this realm and share our impressions of its abundant beauty.
The preceding description varies slightly from the artists’ statement we included with the set, which was donated to the park for visitors’ enjoyment.
Edging Deep Blue, a book of my original poems and photographs related to the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore experiences, evolved as a separate, complementary project for donation to the park. You can see the cover of this book, read more about the poems and accompanying photographs, and read two of the poems below.
Photo by
Charles M. Kreszock
As noted in the Resources website section, further information about Lucia Harrison’s artist’s books, paintings, and teaching activities may be found at Lucia’s website, luciaharrison.com, and at the Evergreen State College website. Throughout her work, Lucia has focused on ecological issues in multifaceted, intuitive, insightful ways. Our PRNL collaboration deepened my appreciation for her remarkable talents and her great generosity as a friend and colleague.
Immediately after the residency I had no plans to write much poetry beyond the haiku, but the images and observations from the Pictured Rocks time remained so vivid that I eventually completed Edging Deep Blue, a hand-bound book with twelve poems and twenty-seven photographs. This book became an additional donation to the park, and here is one of the poems:
First Evening at Home Base, Grand Marais
(August 28, 2006)
My suitcase zipper strains against bulges
of thermal underwear, turtlenecks, wool socks
I was certain of needing in the Upper Peninsula’s
waxing autumn. On the drive to Grand Marais,
the park’s easternmost point, we have shed our jackets,
lowered car windows, commented on green leaves
not yet tinged with fallish hues. At our home base,
a former Coast Guard station (circa 1938), I store
my bounty in a bedroom closet one floor above
the bathroom–once–radio room where, in 1975,
a guardsman sent the last land-based message to
the doomed Edmund Fitzgerald. Years of hi-fi, then
CD rounds of Gordon Lightfoot’s song surge
to my throat, linger. For sixteen nights we will rest
not a tenth of a mile from Lake Superior, from harbor
lights, inner and outer, that have saved other sailors.
This first afternoon settles
into pale grays above
sand dunes, dune grasses, a forty-foot cottonwood
still in full leaf that define our kitchen’s northward
lakeside view. After dinner we stroll past
the park ranger’s residence, follow a sand path
abutting the jetty, read a sign about teens swept away
as they ventured too far on the storm-whipped breakwall.
We step onto it, saunter far toward its tip, sit with backs
against the concrete that holds us over Superior’s
gently lapping waves. As waning rays gather in the west
and slate gray pools in the east, the sky around us
glows pink, then explodes into neon coral that rims
and tinges charcoal, blue-gray, white altocumulus
clouds, billowing and spreading. Mercurochrome light
dances atop shimmering aqua of the placidly
undulant water. To the northwest, black silhouettes
of tree-lined islands stretch far along the horizon,
then slowly rise, shift, disperse: our first mirage.
No cameras, no sketchbooks in hand, we stay fixed
until night has claimed all colors, unveiled the stars.
Several months after returning home from the residency, my family and I visited the Monet in Normandy exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of Art. Mesmerized by certain paintings, I wrote this poem and included it as the final one in Edging Deep Blue:
Indelible Impressions
Étretat! Monet always preserved the memory of . . . the wild cliffs . . . the great unchanging waters under the cloudy sky. –Gustave Geffroy, Claude Monet’s friend and biographer
At the Monet in Normandy exhibition,
among the more than sixty paintings,
I stand transfixed as crowds press on all sides.
The Cliff, Étretat, Sunset and three views
of the Manneporte, the Great Portal, hurl me back
to Superior’s shores, Pictured Rocks scenes.
“As for the cliffs here, they’re like nowhere else,”
wrote Monet of the almost-three-hundred-foot
rock faces. I, on a boat tour, had similar thoughts
while peering at multihued, mineral-streaked
heights much the same. The blazing arch-interior
warmth in The Manneporte, Étretat, the two figures’
tiny scale near the arch base, mirror Grand Portal’s
sunset glow, my place amid vastness. How to capture
blasts of wind and water, centuries’ sculpting–
Michigan sandstone, Normandy limestone?
In bold, swirling strokes Monet’s vibrant blues
whip against corals, golds, browns, gray-greens
and cast me into his late-1800s palette, into my
four-month-old memories, into thoughts
about words’ legacies. Earliest Ojibwa names
for the arches, the streaked cliffs, remain hazy,
and I can merely wonder whether today’s labels
were scribed by some French or British canoeist
who, swept by wistful awe, exclaimed, “Étretat–
le Portail, the Great Portal!” Had Monet’s brushes
brought me the scene explorers admired before
the painter’s birth, one they summoned when
surveying an unfamiliar land? As I scan
exhibition notes and settle again on paintings,
my reflections drift toward the aged Monet,
soothed by Giverny’s gardens, water lilies,
who in his last forty years spoke ever fondly
of what he revisited only in memory, those
soaring realms so close to his childhood haunts.
