Exhibition · Besse Gallery, Bay College

The Wilding Hours

Cabinet of the Wilding Hours, first showing, with Erin LaBonte

November 20, 2025 · Escanaba, Michigan

Widdershins Project Archive · File 3A-9

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A wooden field-naturalist's wagon on a gallery floor: plank-clad rounded roof, a spired cupola with portholes, shuttered windows with puppets inside, a wagon wheel, lanterns and driftwood roots at one end.
The Cabinet of the Wilding Hours, installed at the Besse Gallery, Bay College · Record photograph

A life-sized field-naturalist’s wagon installation. Part reliquary, part self-portrait, part fort. Built exactly to the length of the maker’s body, tall enough to stand inside. It imagines a naturalist who has slipped out of ordinary time, leaving behind watercolor studies, field notes, and artifacts from encounters with the widdershins. Visitors encounter the work not as audience but as posthumous witnesses. No formal artist statement was displayed, in the Mark Dion manner: let viewers find the narrative through objects, fragments, and arrangement.

Shown in The Wilding Hours, a two-person exhibition with Erin LaBonte and her cyanotype-on-fabric work, at the Besse Gallery on the Bay College Escanaba campus, with reception and artist talk on November 20, 2025.

The gallery bought the wagon and one of the twelve watercolor drawings inside for the college’s permanent collection. The apparatus is elsewhere now. What remains here is the record of it, held the way you hold a thing that was once present and is not. Widdershins Project Archive, File 3A-9.

The wagon's far face: a corrugated awning over a shuttered window, hanging scale pans and a moss basket, a bronze porthole, a brass horn, and a large wagon wheel; a blue cyanotype work hangs on the gallery wall beyond.
The far face, with the scales, the porthole and the horn · Record photograph
Inside the wagon: a thick rope descends from the ceiling greenery and frays into root strands over a globe, with watercolor studies hung on lines along both walls toward a lit doorway.
Within, the watercolor studies hung along the walls · Record photograph
Another view inside the wagon: the root-bound globe hangs above a wooden chest and writing box, among a block pulley, a leather satchel, a type drawer, and plates strung on twine.
The root-bound globe among the holdings · Record photograph