During a two week artist residency at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, I familiarised myself with the process of making rammed earth models using sieved local soil and a clay binder. Subsoil is lacking on Deer Isle, so I sourced soil from a local excavator. Too lean, I added clay slip from the clay studio. In the wood workshop, I constructed a portable wooden formwork box partitioned into 10 separate compartments from which ten rammed earth artefacts were made. The resultant models lack a fixed scale and can be interpreted as landscape features, building enclosures, single walls, or individual bricks.
In parallel, I completed paintings and collages using mappings of the surrounding island coastlines as underlays. The work hints at a wider range of scales and applications for rammed earth in open landscapes. It also suggests figure/ground and solid/void relationships that could apply to building massing strategies.