ey there, Friends of the Meyer Farm Project!  I am still alive, and made it home from the Netherlands safely.  I had a restful time there and was so grateful for the opportunity to catch up with my friend Aremy, her husband and daughter.

I spent the remainder of December after I got back working on Christmas commissions, which I, regrettably, did not photograph to share here.

The past two weeks I’ve spent putting together a proposal for an outdoor sculpture for my alma mater, the University of Minnesota, Morris, with my sister Christy.  We came up with an idea that we are rather excited about, so here’s hoping it strikes the committee’s fancy too.    The idea is to honor the university’s agricultural past and their 21st century mission to be an environmentally responsible school by using recycled and local materials to transform a farmer’s round wire corn crib into a contemplative room in the middle of a courtyard.

<This is the corn crib at the Meyer Farm.  We hope to find a similar one closer to Morris, as I have plans to transform this one into something wonderful also 😉

We would hang thousands of small rectangles of salvaged plexi-glass of various shades of transparent blue in the grid of the upper ring, creating a stained-glass-like -> mosaic.

On the bottom ring, we would bind native prairie grass into a thick continuous strand, weaving it in and out of the crib’s vertical > members as if they were splines on a basket, creating a solid, basket-like wall.  This portion is also intended to reference UMM’s past as an American Indian Boarding School.

The floor and interior benches we would tile with local clay.  We’ve been looking to native basketry patterns for the tiling, to tie it to the basket-wall.  Here’s a top down image of the floor.>

So here’s hoping that they choose our proposal.  If they do, you will see images of its construction on this blog.  We will find out at the end of this month.

Here’s a image of the proposed piece in its courtyard :