Holdings · Almanach

Portage Year: An Almanach

fragments from a year of return to the Bay of Stinking Waters

Widdershins Project Archive · File 1A-3 (1634 / 2013)

almanachassemblageorreryreturnbay
An assemblage almanach in a found doll case. A gilt dome with an orrery of clock parts and marbles crowns two chambers, one green and lit from within, one red with a sun face and a steep city street.
Almanach, closed position · dome, green chamber, red chamber · File 1A-3

The earliest holding of the Almanach series, and the oldest object in the archive by the year it reckons. A cosmological accounting built into a found doll case: a gilt dome above, two chambers below, and at the crown an orrery assembled from clock gears, a child’s drawing gear, marbles, wire, a small bell, and the pressing disc of a coffee pot.

The materials are the materials of the ground the year was kept on. The dome of heaven is a dog’s ball, found in the street, halved and painted gold, the brand name preserved on the underside. A vacuum tube stands at the still point of the wheel. A wasp nest in cross section sits at the top of the green chamber. A doll’s hand serves as one of the clock hands in the red. The case is skinned in the maker’s own older prints, cut with openings for looking in.

Two figures keep the chambers. In the green chamber, on a striped floor scattered with loose gears, three forms stand together: a bunny, a human form with no face and electric hair, a raven. In the red chamber a single beast stands in a street of green houses, looking up at the sun wheel and the apparatus above it.

At the base of the red cylinder a calculating disc carries codes in the maker’s hand. 425, 765, 413. No key to them survives.

The file code carries two years, the depicted over the made. The almanach begins its accounting in 1634, at the point where the ships came into the bay called Stinking Waters on the French maps. What came before is not this archive’s to tell.

Detail of the almanach's two chambers beneath the orrery. In the green chamber three small figures stand on a striped floor. In the red chamber a beast stands in a street of green houses drawn in steep perspective.
Detail · the chambers and the base of the dial