Crop Circles and Remediation Field

GAL is very grateful to the New England Grass Roots Fund for the generous grant of $1500 to support the Alchemical Garden in 2011. These funds will help GAL to go forward this year with “Crop Circle and Remediation Field” our  living art installation and soil remediation project.

Rubedo (Red) Permaculture Tree Guild

Become a co-creator in our community articulture project by joining our Alchemical Garden Work Party  this Sunday, May 22nd from 12:00 – 3:00 .We will be sculpting serpentine mulch pathways and sprucing up the garden. Wear work clothes and, if you can, bring along a wheelbarrow, pitchfork or metal rake. GAL will provide light refreshments, eco and permaculture tips and levity.

As part of the Clipper City Rail Trail Birthday celebration, GAL will offer the rail trail celebrants the opportunity to “sow seeds for our sustainable future”  through planting black Kabuli garbanzo beans, and soy beans in the Alchemical Garden. These legumes will nourish the depleted soil and provide an edible crop for the community.

The Alchemical Garden is located at the south entrance of the Clipper City Rail Trail, 40 Parker Street Newburyport, MA 01950 and straddles the Haley’s Bike Spur.

The Alchemical Garden site February 2010

GAL is turning a desolate  field of weeds into a visually compelling garden that will educate and engage the community for years to come. Located on a 160′ x 25′ site near the south entrance  of  Newburyport’s Clipper City Rail Trail, the Alchemical Garden is a richly layered evolving art and horticulture experience  that is accessible on many different levels to the public.

Alchemical Garden is designed to become a model for a sustainable, interactive public garden through the use of symbiotic, low maintenance plantings and recycled materials.

The ancient discipline of Alchemy marries art and science and is famously known for transforming a common material into gold.  The Alchemical Garden will lead the community to transform on a number of levels :

Alchemical Garden with Spring Wheat "Crop Circles" June, 2011

BUILD COMMUNITY:  The Garden creates a gathering space for individuals to form a more intimate relationship with their community.  The space is designed with visual features and seating areas to compel passers-by to pause, reflect, and have a multi-sensory interactive experience ( sight, smell, touch, taste, smell) with the garden and the community.

NOURISH/HEAL:  The garden will nourish its visitors –  both literally and figuratively.  Pesticide free edible fruit will be nourishing to human and animal guests.  Also, the trees and plants have been selected specifically to ensure they work together to purify the toxins in the soil and to sustain themselves and a rich habitat for local fauna over time.

EDUCATE: Signage and sculptural features in the garden will highlight Newburyport’s history of innovation and will link the area’s past with its present. The garden will act as a living laboratory, by cleaning up the soil through the use of hyper-accumulating plants and engaging local students and members of the community in soil testing and monitoring the remediation of toxins. GAL will use the Alchemical Garden as a center for workshops and other events that will educate the public about soil contamination, remediation, ecosystems  and permaculture.

INSPIRE: The Alchemical Garden focuses on the web of relationships between people and the natural world. Signage in the garden will inform  and engage visitors to act in the interest of the community’s future. In addition to the construction of the art park, the Alchemical Garden project will contribute to the community in innovative ways though: educational workshops and interactive art performances that will seek to awaken each individual’s own capacity for imagination and action and to become more engaged stewards of the environment.

The Alchemical Garden is a multi-year project, with completion anticipated in 2013. GAL is grateful to the New England Foundation for the Arts for supporting our mission and  launching the first phase of the garden with a $20,000 grant. To fund our full proposal, we need an additional 136K over the next 24 months. To finish this first phase we have a 2011 fund-raising “target” of securing an additional $36,000 in private donations. GAL believes that no donation is too small and encourages anyone and everyone who believes this will be a valuable addition to both the rail trail and the city’s green mission to be a co-creator. GAL is grateful to the Urban Arts Institute at the Massachusetts College of Art for acting as our fiscal sponsor so that donation can be tax-deductible.

“Funded in part by the Fund for the Arts, a public art program of the New England Foundation for the Arts.”

To make a tax deductable donation to the Alchmical Garden project click here . For The Green Artists League to receive the donation, Alchemical Garden/Green Artists League must be put in the Designation Field on the Urban Arts/Network for Good website.

Our tragic hero will  engage passers-by and crowds as he moves through the festival begging for sustenance in the form of plastic bottles. Ubiquitous plastic bottles act as the signifier of frivolous consumer waste and environmental pollution, while our indigenous frog, an important indicator species for crisis-level environmental degradation is the harbinger of  zoological disaster. For more information on “Appearances” and the Provincetown Green Arts Festival go to Provincetown Conservation Trust.

New Eden Organic Community Gardens Plot Plan

In the spring of 2008, The Green Artists League became one of the first participants in The New Eden Collaborative – the central environmental mission of the First Parish Church of Newbury.

High Rise Nesting Co-op boxes and Radient City Hen House

First Parish’s goal of bring together individuals and environmental groups to develop sustainable community through organic community gardens, organic chicken co-op, and organic CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) and community events was fertile ground for GAL’s first Articulture project.

The participatory art projects at New Eden is the first of GAL’s  3  ”Articulture” community art projects.

GAL inspired projects at the New Eden Collaborative from 2009-2011 include:

• 2009-2010 New Eden Organic Community Garden Plot created by GAL artist/architect  Stephenie Strogney and myself. The garden was designed to break the utilitarian grid of traditional community gardens to cultivate the contemplative and relational aspects of gardening and community. Plots were clustered into “neighborhoods” and paths were configured as to require the walk to turn several times to get to the other side of the garden as a way to increase awareness of  time and place.

• 2009 “Measure Up”  brings relational aesthetics to the garden. In this participatory community action New Eden Community gardeners in their introductory meeting  were asked to work together to define,  measure and plot out the community garden based on  GAL design. As gardeners worked together to define each other’s spaces individual skills and personalities became apparent with in the collaborative process and quickened the nascent community.

• 2009-present “New Eden Mural” A 35′ mural at First Parish Church, Newbury with imagery created from New Eden Collaborative members’ vision of what makes a sustainable community.
  

  New Eden Sustainable Community Mural in Progress

• 2010-present  ”Radiant City”  GAL artist Erin Stack is working with  Chicago based artist Andrew Barco and the New Eden Chicken Co-op share holders to build ”utopian chicken architecture”  out of reclaimed materials as playful practive of animal empathy. For 2011, GAL will be painting an “inspiring” mural inside the coop for the chickens and expanding the chicken yard .
• 2010-present “Conversation Shelter”  GAL artist Stephenie Strogney, GAL intern Cathy Stephens, and my self worked with Cindy Schartman,  Ben Twombly and other New Eden Collaborative members to design and construct a public trellised sitting area with in the private garden plot of one of the New Eden Gardeners. “Conversation Shelter” is an opportunity for dialogue on  issues of community and private space.
• 2011 “Waste Folly” an artful compost container constructed from reclaimed materials is planned for the upcoming growing season.

Erin's Frog Painting in 5 Year Plan Art Book

Exciting News!! GAL founder and Co-director Erin Stack is one of only 32 artists internationally who have been tapped to contribute to a magnificent green arts fundraising project!!

Click here to read the press release.

Click here to visit the 5 Year Plan website.