New beginnings

When this project started, my vision was short and immediate.  There was no time to ponder scope.  I answered the call of the muse, not all of it mine.  Someone in the Copper Country had a vision for me that I was unaware of until this project came together.  Not until the completion was that vision fully revealed to me.  When I was asked if this could have happened without the support of my family and community connections – I responded “No” without hesitation.  I still believe that to be true, but no one person in my community could have made such a thing coalesce.  I was the weaver of this dream project. 

How do such things coalesce from the ether?  The network of friends and family that pulled together to support and encourage this to go smoothly, from start to finish of phase 1 is amazing to me.  These are connections in a spider web of time and place.  I can feel threads pulling to me from beyond the living.  My second-great-grandfather who lived to only 31 in Copper Country in 1891, the other who worked in the Mohawk mine.  Although I can see the web of the generations before me, I don’t have a relationship with these people.  The last of my grandmothers passed this spring.  I have spent time this winter going down the rabbit hole of genealogy and learned a lot in the process.

Until this past year, and the completion of this first phase of “Repopulating of the Past” would I have believed that I could pull off something like this.  I wouldn’t have dreamed of becoming the sole working artist employed to help interpret a National Park.  There is a design afoot that is pulling me back to the Copper Country soil.  I will go again this summer to work and visit.  We will see what comes of that.