Apricot Sap

Movement and materials at a Michigan artists' residency

Poet’s work

Grandfather   

   advised me:

         Learn a trade

I learned

   to sit at desk

         and condense

No layoff

   from this

         condensery

—Lorine Niedecker

A note from a package sent to me by Elizabeth Schmuhl

A Shape

I met  Elizabeth Schmuhl for the first time over the internet this week she had sent me a mysterious package of ingredients and I was curious to understand more. She was drinking a glass of wine and calling from an apartment in Alphabet city via Google hangout while I was eating my room service burger with a glass of wine in my hotel room overlooking the Christmasy downtown lights of the -20°C Calgary night. But we were talking about someplace else. Elizabeth held up her palm in the shape of the map of Michigan (in a way that every Michiganer will know), and pointed with her baby finger to spot just at the meeting point between her thumb and wrist to pinpoint where her family farm was.

poured the blackberry + Lake Michigan water ink onto paper and watched it change

Layering

The property was once a peach orchard owned by her grandparents and sits above a ridge that looks over a sloping forrest full of pines, pawpaw, maple, and oak, and the PawPaw River, which snakes through the forest on its way to Lake Michigan. On the land is a shed that acts as an artist residency and studio for Elizabeth’s ink making, dance, and foragings. When I asked about her work Elizabeth said, “it’s my way of understanding a place with so many layers to explore.”

Apricot sap collected and sent to me by Elizabeth Schmuhl

Binding

Elizabeth talked about how at night in the forest on the property you could sometimes feel the presence of a deer. The deer would rub one of the fruit trees making a mark on the tree that days later would create a little drop of amber sap. Or not. Sometimes the drops of fruit-tree binder seemed to have their own ideas about how and when they would reveal themselves. I dried this bit of sap ground it into dust and slowly stirred it into hot water to give body and protect the delicate colours of a small vial of tulip ink that she sent me.

Tulip ink made by Elizabeth Schmuhl with alum and apricot sap binder

Testing

Elizabeth’s descriptions of the land, even relayed from New York via pixels, conjured up a real and complicated place, and I had a sense of where she meant because my grandparents owned a general store in rural Michigan and retired to a big brick farmhouse in a cornfield, and some of my best childhood memories are from Michigan. But it was more than that. We talked for an hour about family ghosts, driving, anger, the calculus of comets, her Martha-Graham-meets-Paul-Taylor-and-classical-ballet training, the oil and hay smell of old barns, fruit-tree binders, and being alone covered in dirt, and peach fuzz from the orchard. When the hour was up and I had finished my wine and side of hotel fries, it was her first gesture that I most remembered. Using your body to make a map, using your finger to orient yourself on that map, and the wordlessness homecoming of that gesture seemed to encapsulate everything we could possibly say in words.

Please do spread the word, or join the conversation or just let me know what you think. JL