Walking the salt marshes of the Sprague River intertidal zone in the Morse Mountain Conservation Area, participants will learn to read marsh history by looking both deep into the stratigraphic layers of the earth and regarding it from above. We will pull a soil core that allows us to see earth’s time as a vertical element, as traces written palimpsest in shifting terrain beneath our feet, and consider sea level rise in the context of 12,500 years of our planet’s history. We’ll learn about the critical role wetlands and marsh grasses play in carbon sequestration and climate change, and consider our own body's relationship to time. 

LOCATION: Meet at the Morse Mountain Conservation Area parking lot.

REGISTRATION: Not required for this walk.

Beverly Johnson’s research interests involve using geochemical analyses to explore environmental change over a range of temporal and spatial scales. She specializes in organic and stable isotope geochemistry, and the use of stable carbon, nitrogen and sulfur isotopes in modern and ancient organic matter. Bev’s research includes investigate problems such as the history of sea level rise and coastal storms (otherwise known as paleotempestology) as recorded in salt marsh sediments, the size of carbon stocks stored in coastal sediments, methane emissions in altered and recently restored salt marshes. Bev is a member of the international scientific working group on coastal blue carbon, and studies the potential of carbon storage and sequestration in salt marshes, seagrass beds, and mangroves as a means for mitigating climate change.

Julie Poitras Santos’ site-specific practice includes public projects that include a walking component, video, and installation. The relationship between site, story and mobility fuels a wide range of research and production, including the relationship between natural histories and individual story; walking as a form of listening to site; and material agency in an age of climate change. Her work has been exhibited at the Queens Museum, NY; Bates College Museum of Art; Center for Maine Contemporary Art; Karlskrona Konsthall in Karlskrona, Sweden, Institute for Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art; the Centre for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona, Spain; Reykjanesbaer Art Museum in Iceland; and at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, among others. Poitras Santos initiated Platform Projects/Walks, in 2016.

Ecology as a healing agent of the body by using metaphysical mapping. Prior to the walk, participants will create a work of art that connects them to land spaces. The walk will begin at the Eastern Promenade Trail and end at East End Beach where each participant will present their art, culminating with two local storytellers, Jason & Donna Brown (Penobscot) from Decontie & Brown, who will speak to the connections of ecology of the Dawnland, and how it’s inhabitants can learn ways to engage with the land as a source of space healing. The walk is specifically crafted for BIPOC educators and healers. This work is inspired by the Hindi word Kal which means and embodies Yesterday and Tomorrow, accompanied by inspiration from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, a philosopher that explored the interstitial spaces of self, body, and space (For we are, where we are not...). This walk is a quest for BIPOC body identity as interstitial, being here, and not an exteriorized colonized there, the walk and land art merging as a synthesizing of ecology and body.

LOCATION: Meet at the the Casco Bay Ferry Terminal Eastern Promenade Trailhead.

REGISTRATION: Update: This walk is currently full! Register to be placed in the wait list. The walk is specifically crafted for BIPOC educators and healers only. Please register using this link: https://metaphysicalmapping.eventbrite.com

Asata Radcliffe is a writer and multimedia artist. A California native, Asata received her MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from Antioch University in Los Angeles. She writes speculative fiction and essays. Her creative work culminates as multimedia collections of speculative art installation, merging writing, film, and form. Her work invites one to experience the interstitial spaces of speculative landscapes and surrealist futures. Concerned about the planet, her research includes topics of land ethics, futurism, and the nonlinear narratives of human existence. She currently lives and teaches in Portland, Maine.

THE WILDNESS: KIM BECK

Kim Beck has created Grand Openings at the Grand Canyon and skywriting events in places from New York to Missouri. Moving fluidly between media, her work has been shown on billboards along I70, in botanical gardens, on rooftops along the High Line, at the Walker Art Center, Carnegie Museum of Art, Smack Mellon, Socrates Sculpture Park, Warhol Museum, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Art Omi and Hallwalls Center for Contemporary Art. She has been held artist residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, Sharpe-Walentas, Art Omi, Bemis Center, Montalvo among others. She grew up in Colorado and now lives in Pittsburgh where she teaches at Carnegie Mellon.

In Beck’s work for Speedwell Projects, silhouettes of everyday weeds and critters are rendered in vinyl on the windows. The plants and animals in this landscape are a mix of invasive and native species, some threatening, some benign, mostly banal, overlooked and ignored. Defining the window as a border between inside and outside, it is the ground for a repetition of the creatures whose environment we see, alter and coinhabit. 

This talk will be offered on zoom, via Speedwell LIVE

Artists Susan Bickford, Certified Forest Therapy Guide, and Rachel Alexandrou, Botanist, Forager and Kitchen Alchemist, will lead you in exploration and sharing in a local wood. We will slow down, open our senses, do some drawing, writing and embodiment as a part of the experience. We will cover a short physical distance on the walk, (a mile) and include several meditative invitations to drop you into a liminal zone of noticing in a heightened way. A meal of small bites of foraged food will be prepared for you in the wild. By eating this food we become this place. 

This walk is currently full! Please email Susan Bickford, below, to put your name on the wait list.

REGISTRATION: Attendance for this walk is limited; please register by emailing Susan at sbickford@tidewater.net

Susan Bickford is the founding artist of “the (stillness) project" a collaborative interdisciplinary retreat which results in a place based public performance. Working within the tenants of deep ecology, radical hospitality and the transcendentalists, this work fosters a spiritual connection in nature recognizing ourselves within it. Bickford has shown this work as public performance, and video installation at the Maine International Film Festival and traditional galleries. Recently she lead a walk at the The Picnic Pavillion during the Venice Biennale and the Ogunquit Museum of American Art. BFA/BID RISD1986 and MFA MECA 2001, Forest Therapy Guide 2017, Shamanic Practitioner 1995. ;

Rachel Alexandrou is an interdisciplinary artist and botanist who blends plant science, food, and visual art together to create informative and intriguing events. Her project Foraged Feast focuses on Maine’s edible flora and accessibility to education around local plants. She is inspired by place based radical hospitality and collaboration with artists from Maine and around the world. Support for the Foraged Feast is provided, in part, by the Kindling Fund, a grant program administered by SPACE as part of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Regional Regranting Program. 

Additional supporting artists: Chip Barchilon, Gabrielle Brown, Juliette Sutherland

CHAUSSURES: VIVIANE LE COURTOIS

“To walk is to think, to create, to process life. In 1991, I designed my first pair of minimal string shoes to sculpt them with the movement of walking. Traveling in 41 countries with 208 pairs of shoes, I have analyzed how people everywhere in the world have preconceptions about people from what they wear. The resulting collection of used shoes is a series of sculptures that will continue as a long as I can walk. Using shoes have become a conversation starter, a collection of memories collected along the way.”

Viviane Le Courtois has created process-based artworks and conceptual installations since 1989. Her art often intrigues visitors by connecting art to everyday life and inviting thoughtful participation. Viviane received her DNSEP (MFA) from the Ecole Pilote Internationale d’Art et de Recherches in Nice, France in 1992. After extensive travels in Asia, she moved to the US in 1994, completing an MA in Art History at the University of Denver in 2000. She was the recipient of a Korea Foundation fellowship in 1993, a Colorado Mastermind in Visual Arts in 2009, an Octopus Initiative grant from the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver in 2018. She has exhibited in Europe and across the US including at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, the Denver Botanic Gardens, the Biennial of the Americas and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. She is an art instructor, curator, and the co-founder of Processus, the institute of art and life.

This talk will be offered on zoom, via Speedwell LIVE

Long Island Drift will consist of a series of walks around Long Island, Maine beginning in mid-July and culminating on September 19th with a public walk to Fowlers Beach, when a high tide measuring 11.2’ is predicted to arrive at 1:03PM. The aim is to observe and record dynamic and ephemeral changes taking place on the island. The walks will build upon a King Tide Party artists’ collective event that took place in 2017. Coastal communities in the North Atlantic are feeling the impacts of ecological change and transformation; this project is supported through the Maine Economic Improvement Fund and will lead to a comparison between island dwellers in Casco Bay and communities in South Greenland.

LOCATION: To join DRIFT, take the 10 am ferry to Long Island from the Casco Bay Lines terminal at 56 Commercial Street, Portland. The starting point for the walk is Mariners Wharf Ferry Dock on Long Island. You will be greeted there by J. Piribeck and a company of walkers who will provide information about the island and lead you on a one-mile trek to the Fowlers Beach destination. Information about the island and beach will be provided, and participants will be invited to create a response to the walk for inclusion in the LONG ISLAND DRIFT exhibition display. The walk will conclude back at the dock in time to catch the 2:20 pm ferry to the mainland.  

This walk is currently full! Please email Jan Piribeck, below, to put your name on the wait list.

REGISTRATION: Please contact Jan Piribeck piribeckj@gmail.com  

Jan Piribeck’s creative practice explores relationships between the Arts, Humanities and (GISci) Geographic Information Science. She is the Principle Investigator for Maine-Greenland Collaborations, an interdisciplinary project that examines the impacts of a changing environment on coastal communities in Maine and South Greenland. She has led and participated in numerous discussions and about art and environment, and her work has been featured recently in exhibitions such as: Anthropocenic: Art About the Natural World in the Human Era, Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, ME and Melt Down, an exhibition about the Arctic and Antarctica, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME.

CLIMATE CHANGE IN MAINE: NICK RECORD

Nick Record is a Senior Research Scientist at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences Boothbay, Maine. His work uses computational ocean models and mathematical ecology to understand and predict ocean biogeography, biogeochemistry, and climate. He has worked on short-range forecasting, such as predicting the migration patterns of whales, as well as long-range forecasting, such as investigating the way ecosystems will respond to climate change. His models typically combine ocean physics with biological and ecological processes, but he also uses machine learning and artificial intelligence.

This talk will be offered on zoom, via Speedwell LIVE

This walk gathers just before dawn along the Presumpscot River. It meanders through and cuts across spaces-between: between surface and depth, the Penobscot and Presumpscot watersheds, Native and settler (be)longings, the human and the more-than-human; between yesterday, today, and something coming. As we cross from night into day, walkers will share story, dreams, and two-way encounters with the water—an experiment in breeding futurity.

LOCATION: Presumpscot River Preserve trailhead, following the trail to Presumpscot Falls.

REGISTRATION: Requested, but not required for this walk. RSVP here!

The trail on which we'll conduct this walk is not strenuous, but it is also not fully accessible. We are shaping our walk to include accessible options, so when you RSVP, please let us know about any accessibility concerns in your group to help us plan! The ground is uneven, with exposed roots, some brief steep sections, and occasional slick areas due to foot and bike traffic. A person with full mobility walking this trail at a leisurely pace would arrive at the falls from the trailhead in roughly 25 minutes. There are further details about the trail terrain here.

In Kinship Fellowship is Lilah Akins, Devon Kelley-Yurdin, Emilia Dahlin, Cory Tamler, Jennie Hahn, Darren Ranco, Tyler Rai. The Fellowship is a collective formed out of a year-long research and creation process that followed the tradition of Wabanaki Guiding, connecting Native and non-Native people to place through experience, language, and story. Those guides and thought partners include Jennifer Neptune, James Eric Francis, Sr., Chris Sockalexis, Ryan Kelley, Micah Pawling, Gretchen Faulkner, Desiree Butterfield-Nagy, and the Penobscot River watershed in Wabanaki/Maine.

Please join us for a discussion between artists and scientists regarding the role field work plays in their practices. While artists and scientists perform research differently, one of the key factors in any form of field-based study is the act of site-specific observation. Walking allows for a keen attention to our surround at the pace of five kilometers per hour, allowing us to observe and listen to site. The engagement of walking field work is important to reflections and analyses for moving forward, now and in the coming years, as we stay with the trouble revealed by our current planetary shifts and changes.

Panelists: Artist Tracey Cockrell, Geologist Beverly Johnson, Artist Jan Piribeck, and Environmental Geophysicist Raj Saha. Moderator: Julie Poitras Santos

This panel discussion will be offered on zoom, via Speedwell LIVE

Throughout the city of Portland, ME, the esplanade, or median, the space between the street and the sidewalk, is often an overlooked, and underutilized side-effect of public/private right-of ways that populate most street typologies. Their care and maintenance depend on the adjacent owner’s purview, but access is open to city intervention and regulation. Also known as the hellstrip, varying in size from 12” to as large as 3’ – these unforgiving spaces collect garbage bags, dog poop, cigarette butts, political signs, and needles, but also flowers, edibles, pollinators, and rain gardens. Currently there are no formal guidelines, but the City is in the process of developing formal recommendations for esplanade plantings along city streets. This is an opportune time to observe and document these rogue miniature ecosystems.

LOCATION: Meet at Speedwell projects, 630 Forest Ave, Portland

REGISTRATION: Not required for this walk.

For over 15 years, Addy Smith-Reiman has successfully engaged people with projects that celebrate local identity, shared histories and future use. She integrates research, design, civic engagement and long-term stewardship planning for successful projects that activate PLACE. She holds Master’s Degrees in Regional Planning and Landscape Architecture from Cornell University. She is a certified planner, accredited organic land care professional, and Master Gardener, and is currently the Executive Director of the Portland Society for Architecture.

In this time of stress and disconnection, we all can gain by having a more intimate relationship with our natural surroundings. In Maine, it's wonderfully easy to step into the outdoors, but even us "big city" dwellers in Portland have so much beauty around us. Join John Sundling of Plant Office for a walking tour of some of his favorite weed patches, foraging along the way to gather materials for a design workshop.

LOCATION: Meet at the Park'n'Ride at Franklin & Marginal Way.

REGISTRATION: Not required for this walk.

John Sundling is a fool for flowers and plants. Seriously, they define pretty much all aspects of his life. His greatest joy is Plant Office, a houseplant shop, floral & design studio in Portland. Known for his custom installations, color play, and materiality, John is fascinated by ephemeralities, the effects of time and weather, & the transformative power of natural beauty. You can see his work around town regularly, with ongoing collaborative relationships with Portland Museum of Art, SPACE, Hugo’s, Drifter’s Wife, Cong Tu Bot, and a growing roster of Portland’s best organizations & individuals.

When we walk in Nature, human beings often view themselves as the relational beginning in an ecology and those things that surround us as mere objects for the aesthetic experience. We pass a tree but do not examine its leaves, we see a pond but do not pause to explore its ecology, we step across a log but do not look to see who lives there. Patterns abound in Nature and we are but one thread in that incredible tapestry. If we take time to experience the sensory banquet that surrounds us, we may discover textures, patterns and colors that deeply inspire us as artists. We will also be reminded that we are not the only residents of the neighborhood. We are giants strolling through a world of smaller connected ecologies connected to the web of life.   

LOCATION: Meet at the Westbrook Street Fore River Trail trailhead. There is parking directly across the street adjacent to the trailhead. Please bring a small pad of paper and something to write with; and remember to bring water, sunblock and bug spray!

REGISTRATION: Not required for this walk.

Mihku Paul is a Maliseet writer and artist whose family comes from Kingsclear First Nations, N.B.  She holds a BA in Communication and Human Development and an MFA in Creative Writing. Mihku’s first solo exhibit was at the Abbe Museum, and consisted of archival photographs, twelve panels of poetry and her own original art set as a river flowing around the gallery. Her first book of poetry, 20th Century PowWow Playland, was published in 2012. Mihku’s art has been published in the international journal POEISIS, and been selected for the cover of MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States). She lives and works in Portland.