YEAR 00001 AT OBSERVATORY

image courtesy: Durl Kruse

Located at 158 High Street, smudge studio’s geo | cosmo field station, OBSERVATORY, rides upon Belfast ledge bedrock within the thin crust of planet Earth. Here, we experiment with aesthetic experience as a means for expanding human senses of place and time to include the vastness and generative power of the cosmos and our planet. 

Each day arrives bringing forces and events from deep within space and time right up to and through OBSERVATORY’s windows. We try to sense how these vast and intimate things and beings shape us—and how we shape them. Using ancient and contemporary practices of observation, we experiment with non-habitual ways of seeing and making sense. We slow down, stop the chatter, and pay close and wide attention. 

Old stories about place, self, and others don’t serve us well when we try to express what we are observing in this time of unprecedented social and environmental change. In the field station, we experiment with creating new frames for seeing and making sense of the fast environmental and cultural change that envelopes us. Unexpected sensations of interconnection with other humans—and with nonhuman things, beings, and environmental forces—arise. We signal our field observations via COSMOS DAILY, a regularly updated window installation at 158 High Street, offering “koan-like” provocations and musings for public engagement. 

Inside OBSERVATORY’s workshop, we story the results of our observations through images, objects, and micro-productions that we call “material tales.” 

We present our own and other artists’ material tales in OBSERVATORY’s workshop gallery and ERRATIC OBSERVATIONS project space. Here, we encourage community engagement and participation through evolving exhibitions, demonstrations, and events. These are specific to Belfast, Maine while at the same time engaging interconnections and co-shapings between the local and the planetary. 

In OBSERVATORY’s TEA HUT, we share our muse: Japanese green tea. Here, we serve up contemporary practices of tea drinking. Each tea practice is designed in anticipation of a particular tea’s brewing and its unique expression of the forces of sun, earth, season, and cultural wisdom that compose it. OBSERVATORY’s tea events invite guests to savor ephemeral weathers, vibrant plant lives, living soils, and wise food cultures from far away—and from nearby. 

At OBSERVATORY, then, smudge studio’s aim is to make and share work that realizes our meaningful and generative belonging within the cosmos. We explore how aesthetic experience might soothe our senses of confusion, despair, and even of loss as the places we live and love transform in our lifetimes. We start from what is right at hand, within this unique moment, for us to sense, live, make, and share. And then we start again, from within the next.

image: Durl Kruse

ON-SITE programming includes:

  • Observation-based micro-productions and workshops for creating and reflecting on embodied experiences of geo | cosmo change (such as, observations of changing light, wind, sky, climate, season, transits of moon, planet, sun—as well as local community change, land-use, migrations of humans and non-humans and their ramifications across social and cultural difference and geographic distance.)

  • Public reading and library space including resources dedicated to ancient and contemporary observational practices: geology, environment, art, land-use interpretation, Daoism, weather/cloud spotting, tea, long life design.

  • COSMOS DAILY window installations, free and open to the public, viewable 24/7.

  • Collaborative observational and field note projects and events staged in conjunction with local Belfast and Maine organizations, individuals and businesses.

  • Exhibitions of work by guest artists, educators, and practitioners curated through the lens of observations of geo |cosmo | planetary change in our main gallery and the ERRATIC OBSERVATIONS (EO) project space.

  • Offerings of smudge studio’s printed material tales (field guides, chapbooks, decks of cards, postcards, letterpress works).

  • Offering of smudge studio art works: digital camera obscuras, natural ink prints, watercolors and collage—material tales of daily, ephemeral geo-cosmo forces and events. 

  • Educational displays and offerings of Long Life Designs from Japan as material tales about cultural traditions of sustainable making and using (beginning with displays and offerings of teaware and functional tableware designed for generations of use and now 100+ years old).

  • “Slow tea with the planet”: an evolving series of 30-60 minute long micro-productions and tea events, booked by reservation, that reframe the brewing and drinking of tea as a geo/cosmo event.

  • Offering local landscape inspired, gluten free, vegan, chocolate “ledge cookies” as a material tale of the Maine bedrock upon which OBSERVATORY stands. 

Please stop in and say hello during our open hours, by appointment or send us a message.