Sonja Dahl
Jovencio de la Paz
Stacy Jo Scott

Ox-Bow, like the Bauhaus Schools, like Black Mountain College, like many schools of art and craft nestled throughout North America's countryside, has presented an idyllic, monastic haven for makers like ourselves, intrepid over the globe. Arriving here, we established another space, a school within a school, the Craft Mystery Cult, a center for craft-mystics and a nexus of hand-work. Each of us, stewards of our skills, begins our work in the past, to evoke ancient, esoteric concerns in order to confound the concerns that are, and to embrace the ones yet to be. As William Morris attempted to bring scenes and motifs of wild-nature into the home, so we went out into that nature, to make work and to take ourselves apart from our everyday, to open the doors of our studios in the abandon of those days. And as always, place seeps into our work. Ox-Bow Lagoon, at sunset, tests the limits, the virtuosity of each painter who sits before it. To remake its glassy surface, an epic task, a test laid out before the breezy glass studio.

Sitting dock-side, the water's amusements were a welcome, daily counterpoint to laboring in the studio, the white-eyed carp with their open mouths, gentle as old dogs. We each leave our respective marks here, and they add up to the texture of the landscape, the history felt at the corners of all things here. How do we fix ourselves to place, tideless or otherwise? Is this place remembered in what we make here? Is what we make remembered here, in turn? Touching the edges of names tagged on the walls of our studios, we think of all the signs we make to mark place, to attach ourselves to them. We make these signs of ourselves in the hopes that we can mixed up, in the minds of others, in the memory of place. And at the end of each name written in the hope of memorial, there is the potential for transdimentional collaboration. Collaboration with space, with what can be felt of its past, shimmering in the present.

Early on in the Summer, Chris Johanson said that we collaborate despite ourselves, beyond ourselves and our delineated communities, with each and every flickering self over the full arc of the history of our species. We stood and watched Norwood Viviano and Daniel Matheson lead their students in an Iron pour, which became more and more a collaboration choreographed not by an individual, but by the molten material itself. Many cast-offs remain of our practices: a slag-pile from the iron pour, impurities from the molten metal poured onto the ground to be discarded later. The pile of slag is incidental, unimportant, a throw-away thing. Yet it remains a corollary, an alternative narrative, a sign that a community was here, they poured iron together, a process echoing over the valleys of countless millennia, here too at Ox-Bow.

For everything we make, we leave mysterious traces. Broken glass on the floor of the glass studio may have held, for a trembling moment, the breath of its maker. Clay shards still with fingerprints, lines of thread scattered here and there, the many residues of paint marking silhouettes of absent canvases on the walls. These things haunt the edges of all the trails here. Signs of makers both recent and long gone. They sparkle like apparitions in the meadow, walking to the Crow's Nest, glimmers of white paper, here and there, swept up and sometimes forgotten, but always at the heart of the place. Do these fingerlings so often tickled by grass-tips of studio brooms ask to be remembered? They are what we leave here, minuscule signs of us. En masse, their gravity sinks into the ground to be the foundation of where we wander on the surface.

The Craft Mystery Cult (Sonja Dahl, Jovencio de la Paz, Stacy Jo Scott) would like to thank The Ox-Bow School of Art and the Robert C. Larson Art, Design and Architecture Venture Fund for their generous support of those who delve into those ancient, esoteric concerns.