Suttle Lake

Work made during my time as the artist in residence at The Suttle Lodge in Oregon. The lodge sits at the edge of Suttle lake, a gray and green puddle of promises just over the crest of the cascades. After months of constant movement, my time at Suttle became a solitary meditation in sitting still, an experiment in the rapid revisitation of one place, day after day.

Every day I would walk the entire lake and learn about it, inch by inch. Some days it would take a morning, others an entire day. I’d sit under trees and write poems. I’d eat apples and read Steinbeck to the dog. I’d stare across the lake and watch the weather roll in off the mountain. It was calm, nourishing, and necessary.

After two weeks, I invited 20 friends who had never been to the lodge to come out and join me. When they arrived, I handed them small booklets that I had made with instructions for a sort of scavenger hunt around the lake in hopes that they would learn a bit about it… and themselves. The next day, we set up a few tables in the snow and served each other soup that we had each made for the occasion. I have never seen so many soups in one place.

After the soup, we went into the lodge to sit by a fireplace while my buddy Blair sang some of her tunes before I got up to ramble a bit about the work that I had put up on the wall for everyone to look at. It was something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time, an experiment in bringing people into a landscape with intention rather than the other way around.

It was an exercise in intimacy, in the co-creation of memories to help others build a meaningful relationship with land that I have come to love.