Unfolding Place

This is a Collaborative Project. Susan Bickford is the founding artist producer, director and editor of “the (stillness) project”, a place based collaborative interdisciplinary intensive. Working within the tenants of deep ecology, radical hospitality and transcendentalism, this work fosters a spiritual connection in nature. The goal being to listen, recognize ourselves as belonging to nature, ultimately remembering it as our home. In it’s 8th year the project has become a true collaborative effort. Other years of the (stillness) project have been shown at the Maine International Film Festival and in traditional gallery spaces. Bickford crafts aesthetic experience in nature combining her skills as and artist in performance, video and installation with her skills as an environmental educator and Forest Therapy guide. She also gives a walks at various Nature Conservancies the The Picnic Pavilion during the Venice Biennale, at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Maine and the Stanley Whitman House in Farmington, Connecticut.
Susan Bickford holds a BFA/BID Rhode Island School of Design in1986 and an MFA from Maine College of Art 2001, Guide Certificate from The Association of Forest Therapy Guides and Programs 2017, Shamanic Practitioner from Spirit Passages in 1995. Bickford is currently a student of Astrology and Qigong and has been teaching art at The University of Maine at Augusta since 2003.

Annie Bailey is a multi-media artist born and raised in Tenants Harbor, Maine. She uses visual metaphors as symbolic representations of the human psyche. Bailey is interested in what our physical bodies know and carry from their experience, and how that knowledge translates through the expression of a mark on canvas. Her intention is to balance spontaneous, energetic brush-work with thoughtful, structured composition in order to explore inner and outer worlds.

Katherine Ferrier is a queer poet, dancer, maker, teacher, curator, and community organizer based in Rockland, Maine. She has been the Director of the Medomak Fiberarts Retreat, where she also teaches felting, improvisational patchwork, and writing for makers, since 2018. Her work grows out of a deep practice of paying poetic attention to the world, and lives in the intersecting communities of movers, makers, writers and activists. A self-taught quilter, she has improvisationally designed and constructed more than 100 quilts, drawing on her years of study, both formal and independent, of movement, poetics, painting and architecture, among other forms.

Robin Lane currently attends the University of Southern Maine where he is the first cellist to pursue a Bachelor of Music in Performance with a concentration in jazz studies. Robin performs classical, jazz, and contemporary works for public events, private events, and weddings throughout New England. Notable performance venues include Camden International Film Festival, One Long Fellow Square, and Maine Yoga Festival. In addition to performing, Robin records, engineers, and produces his own music, along with the music of a growing number of local musicians, out of his studio in Rockland. On the rare occasion that Robin is not involved in music, you might find him spending quiet time in nature, practicing yoga, or enjoyably working on his car.

Heather Lyon is a performance, video and installation artist born in Ellsworth, Maine and working in Blue Hill, Maine. Combining her interest in the meanings of materials (ranging from rebar to sequins to milk to ash) and the question of the human body, she investigates relationships and the ways in which we negotiate longing, loss, desire, and vulnerability. Her work has recently been exhibited and performed at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, Maine; SPACE, Portland, Maine; IMRC Center, University of Maine Orono, Orono, Maine: Cove Street Gallery, Portland, Maine; TEMPOart, Portland, Maine; The Danforth Gallery, University of Maine Augusta, Augusta, Maine; Cynthia Winings Gallery, Blue Hill, Maine; Zaratan, Lisbon, Portugal; “The Picnic Pavilion” a parallel project to the 58th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy; The State Silk Museum, Tbilisi, Georgia and at Artisterium 10, Tbilisi, Georgia.

Luke Myers is a sculpturally oriented visual and conceptual artist investigating connection with the natural world, and how technology helps or hinders that process. He received his BA in studio arts from the University of Maine at Augusta, and his MFA (2021) from the University of South Florida. His multidisciplinary work has been exhibited in Maine, Florida, and recently in London.