The Ruins of the Midwest

Time makes everything seem more deep and meaningful, so let me be honest about what this was. In the fall of 2006 I was near the height of my studies, carrying 21 credits and barely holding that together. My dad was clearing the family farm to sell it, and the buildings were full of free material. I was trying to accomplish projects, to experiment with materials and processes, to learn. There was less time to think and reflect. I just had to do.

But the material was not neutral. It was the machines of that farm. The tractor, the wagon, all the old cast iron, the turn-of-the-century machinery that filled the barns. As a kid I rode them and sat on them, with my sister, with friends, alone, with my dog, and imagined other worlds. Usually a spaceship, and I was pulling the levers. I think those machines are why I love rust, the color of it, the patina of things. They were left for us by the Speerschneiders, the family that built the farm in 1865 and sold it to my parents, whose name was still a long cardboard stencil on the granary's second floor, cut to letter their name onto their wagons. That granary was my fort for years, and later my workshop. By the time I was grown the machines had become, in my memory, magical machines.

So when the farm began to empty, I went through its bric-a-brac and salvaged what I could as material for art. I understood, even in the rush, what I was doing with it: taking objects of old, broken or cast away, and giving them new life, and giving them the tribute they deserved for making my childhood so magical. These are our ruins of the Midwest. Not Roman ruins, but some divine beast left to die in a field with the brambles growing over it, or cast off in a stone pile in the hedgerow. The kind of pile I still like to scavenge through now.

The work came out in two lanes. The big iron became machines again:a machine for not hearing, built from the horse trough;a machine for leaving, built from my childhood bike;a machine for becoming, the copper still in the ravine;a machine for sowing, the trebuchet built from the burned harvest beast. The small leavings, down to a single rusty bolt, became relics, and gathered that spring into the Wunderkammer, the cabinet that was my senior thesis. And the same year I was photographing ground that holds what happened to it, the empty places of the Spirit of Place series. Same year, same nerve, though I could not have told you that at the time.

I did not grieve right away. I was sad when the farm sold in November of 2007, but not the way I am now, all these years later, writing these pieces and seeing the throughlines of everything. The grief arrived on a delay, and so did the meaning. That is why this page exists twenty years after the work: the reflection is the second act of the salvage. Looking back, I wish I had preserved more. I really wish I could have preserved the whole thing. But I know that is not healthy, and that everything changes, and we need to move on. Salvage is what you do instead of keeping everything. I only got a bit of it out. This is the bit.