Here’s a twist on the traditional artist residency program: Spend a week or two in the woods, camping out in a vintage trailer-turned-studio, with the sights and sounds of Oregon’s beautiful Mount Hood National Forest as your primary (only?) inspiration.
That’s how the new Signal Fire residency program works, reports The Bear Deluxe, a quirky magazine of arts and the environment published by the Portland-based nonprofit Orlo (article not available online). Husband and wife Amy Harwood and Ryan Pierce–a program director for a forest conservation group and a visual artist, respectively–dreamt up the project, and bought and refurbished a trailer to get things rolling. Thanks to her work, Harwood knows all the best spots at Mt. Hood, and “promises to place artists in a cozy room with an exceptional view of nature.”
And what a cozy room it is: an “8-by-18-foot Road Ranger trailer, vintage 1975, sporting the era’s requisite sun-bleached yellow and orange racing stripes.” Harwood and Pierce have fixed it up, though, sprucing it up with “custom workbenches and cubbyholes to complete the feeling of a studio.”
“What I’m hoping,” Harwood tells the Bear Deluxe, “is that by putting the trailer as far out as we can get it into the wild places around Mount Hood, we’ll be able to capture a little bit of that inspiration and still offer the incubation of a space.”
Source: The Bear Deluxe
Image by Darren // DA Creative Photography, licensed under Creative Commons.
