The Larry Spring Museum launches the Redwood Time project with a call for personal and historic fabric, a mushroom and plant foraging walk, and a community dye gathering.
At the center of Redwood Time is a radical, as in root, study and re-envisioning of the monumental Redwood Round adjacent to the Guest House Museum on Fort Bragg’s Main Street. Cut from the ‘largest Redwood tree known to have grown in Mendocino County’, the round functions as roadside spectacle, as tourist attraction, and as a monument to the timber industry and the settler town that grew around it. If one approaches closely enough to read the timeline pinned to the round’s face: from its rings have been conjured the tale of how this one particular story fits within the context of canonical world history.
In this way, the tree’s rings, measuring time, offer us a mirror. The pins and the plaques, the timeline, and the saw blade adorning the round are what certain people saw and wanted to see when the round was dedicated by the people of Fort Bragg in 1943.
What do we see when we look at the round today? What do we hope to see tomorrow?
In the spirit of exploring these questions, we will create a 1:1 scale fabric maquette of the 18’ wide Redwood Round. Through unfolding events considering a multiplicity of histories, species, natural philosophies, and concepts of time itself, we will adorn this round with a new timeline, and new accoutrements.
What dates will it memorialize? What accessories, what talismans will it wear?
The first tasks at hand are to gather the fabric that will be used in creating the maquette, to dye the fabric with local sources of color, and to sew the round.
This is a community endeavor, and we hope you all will join us!
This project was made possible with support from California Humanities, a partner of the NEH. Visit calhum.org
Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this installation and performance do not necessarily represent those of California Humanities or the National Endowment for the Humanities.
