By Ammy Paige Condon
A gathering of fibers and architecture students and their professors is ushered in silence. As they step down from the dike carved from the earth more than 200 hundred years before by hands as dark as the soil they landed on, a surreal landscape of 231 cypress knees rising like spirits reaches toward heaven, wrapped in coils of rope.
A weave of branches and twigs marks a path through the swamp bed and leads to a hammock of white muslin squares—again, 231 of them—strung between two trees. They wave, sun-dappled, like Buddhist prayer flags, each stamped with the name of a slave who built the dike, grew and harvested the rice of the LeConte-Woodmanston Plantation in Liberty County.
Fourth-year fibers student, Megan Kiehna of Illinois, spoke first, introducing the result of a collaboration between third-year architecture students and a 3D Fibers class.
“We tried to harness the spirits, the souls rooted in this place,” she said.
A fallen tree, she notes, became the symbol of life – a bridge between one riverbank to the other, from this world to the next.
This team, one of two with equal numbers of building arts and fibers students, was inspired by the earth works of Welsh environmental artist, Andy Goldsworthy, and of the repetition found in Maya Lin’s simple forms and timelines. They used the words “individual” and “journey” as guideposts.
Fibers professor Liz Seargent remarked that the use of rope reminds her of nets and of mending or repair, of healing. She asked the students if they had considered wrapping the knees at the imagined water line.
Professor of architecture LaRaine Pappas Montgomery questioned wrapping the downed tree. The students admit it was a last-minute decision, done the day before after weeks of planning and several Sundays spent installing the memorial.
This admission presents a teaching moment.
“The last things you do are rarely your best ideas,” Montgomery said.
The group walked back up the trail to encounter a threshold created from unruly vines bound together with crocheted chains so subtle they blend into the surroundings just like the silken web of the golden orb spider guarding the path. The archway hangs over a bridge that leads into and out of the regulated and informal spaces of the plantation.
“Community” and “confinement” inspired the second team of students, says Arielle Vialardo, an architecture student from New York.
“Slave lives revolved around passages,” Vialardo said, describing the physical and metaphysical thresholds the team sought to achieve with its installation. “Now in this moment in this space you can actively engage.”
Montgomery noted that the threshold controls access to the most fragile ecosystems, thereby creating tension and risk, and that the bridge serves as a well-chosen space to connect this site with other installations.
It wasn’t the team’s first choice, though. Swarms of hornets prevented them from working in their previous space near a lagoon slaves fished in during the free time granted them by the plantation owners. The descendants of those slaves still gather at the lagoon and fish these waters.
Hornets weren’t the only challenge facing the students. On their first day on site, a rattlesnake sunned itself in the middle of the trail. Mosquitoes as hungry as the vampires of “Twilight” feasted on their flesh.
Yet, in this first phase of the collaborative project, the architecture students learned from the fibers students about materials and sourcing. The architecture students stressed the concepts of engaging space and structure.
“The words differ, but the ideas are universal,” said Montgomery.
The next phase of the alliance between the two disciplines involves the development of a site plan for a Praise House, a chapel meant for the enjoyment of the slaves’ descendants and for special events for the foundation that preserves the property.
The architecture students will work individually with a fibers student to incorporate a weaving into their design, translating it into structural support or building skin. Found objects on site, such as pine cones, and natural features will play heavily into the design concepts, which will be presented to the community at the Rice Festival, slated for Nov. 14 in Riceboro.
