ROCKLAND—With all of the talk on farm fresh food that buzzes around the Midcoast, it’s often the chefs, not the farmers who take the spotlight. Blue Hill artist Heather Lyon, currently living in Rockland as an an artist in residence through the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation for six weeks, decided two years ago, to give farmers in Blue Hill a platform, elevating the mundane daily tasks spent outside working the land into an art form. The result was “The Farm Project,” a three-pronged exhibition, which debuted at The Maine Farmland Trust Gallery in 2015.

Lyon, who was born on a small family farm, has a deep connection to the Blue Hill community and was interested in training her camera on the hands of farmers of all generations from five different farms. “I wanted to photograph their hands holding soil, that which is essential and which is the beginning of all growth,” she said. She also shot photos of them holding milk from cows they’d just milked.

“What our farmers do is a gift to all of us,” she said. “After I’d moved back to Blue Hill, it was a way for me to reconnect with these people and this place.” Beyond the photographs, she took the soil from all five farms and constructed the loose material into a compact block along with local clay, water and straw to be displayed on a podium. During the exhibition, to her surprise, the block of soil began sprouting shoots. “It was both a literal and poetic bringing together of the farms I visited,” she said. “The sprouting seedlings were just even more of a physical reminder how this art piece was still living organism.”

The third component was a 30-foot tablecloth.

Lyon invited a dozen farmers and their families to come together for a meal prepared by Aragosta chef and owner Devin Finigan consisting exclusively of foods grown and raised by the farmers on the Blue Hill peninsula.  Lyon encouraged the farmers to make as many spills and stains onto the tablecloth as they wished. Afterward, she recorded embroidered on top of spills and stains. “We usually want stains to go away and bleach them out, but I wanted them to record the event,” she said. “When the farmers came to the exhibition, they all could remember where they were seated at the table and what they’d eaten, according to the stains that were visible on the cloth.

A creator in multiple mediums, she is currently exploring the significance of human body as part of her residency. She has several artworks up Asymmetrick Arts & Black Hole Gallery’s Spring Exhibition 2017, including “animal pelts” made from painted cloth positioned in place by rebar, symbolizing the tension between the soft and unyielding, between animal and man-made. Her next project is creating a video triptych, videotaping herself interacting with natural substances. “It is through the experience of the body that we connect to the natural world and to experience a more profound consciousness,” she said.

To see more of her work visit: https://www.heatherlyon.com

Kay Stephens can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com