Full title: Badges for Brooke Valley - small verses my heart keeps singing
A summer installation at fieldwork, a land art site outside of Perth, Ontario. It is near to Brooke Valley, a small community I grew up in.
Alongside the events and passages that shape the life of a community are smaller, more individual events
in a life in the local landscape. Badges for Brooke Valley celebrates the small moments of life in its woods
and fields, drawing upon memories of growing up in the area adjacent to the fieldwork site.
Skating over weeds frozen into ice, discovering secret patches of flowers in the forest, or going to the
outhouse at night – these passages were a big deal to me as a child, and form a unique kind of skill set,
overlooked beside more practical proficiencies and forgotten when I became an adult, now living in a city.
When I think back to my life here, I miss those subtle engagements that quietly strengthen the connection
to the land.
This is what Badges for Brooke Valley celebrates. Like scouts’ or guides’ merit badges, the badge
marks experience of mastery, of adaptation to the situation at hand. Unlike official merit badges, these
ones mark memories and skills unique to a person’s experience of growing up in the landscape. Here it is
the minor events, the childhood memories, the overlooked and idiosyncratic experiences of daily life in the
country that are commemorated.
Summer 2010