Community News

Mapping the working coasts: using art to understand the waterfront


	Participants' maps are rolled with the collaborators' notes and stored aboard the Sunbeam. Photo by Sara Nics.

An unusual vessel floated into Boothbay Harbor on September 16. On board was a living art project that was part visual art, part audio art, part oral history project and pushed even at the blurred edges of installation.

Anyone on the Boothbay Harbor waterfront that sunny Thursday was welcome to board the boat and become part of the project, Mapping the Working Coasts: An Investigation into the Working Coasts of Maine.

Visitors were met by one of the many collaborators aboard; some from the community development corporation, Coastal Enterprises Inc., others from the spurse collective and Shunpike Audio. On the boat's main floor, among shelves of research books and rolled up paper, three tables were set with vellum and indelible markers. Over the tables hung more vellum covered with maps, notes, sketches, dates and descriptions.

Guests were invited to sit at one of the tables and talk about their memories of the coast, any coast, with one of the collaborators. At some point in the conversation, pens were picked up and visitors were asked draw their relationship to the coast. Meanwhile, one of the collaborators took notes on another sheet of vellum; another set up his microphone to record many of the visitors' stories.

The visitors' drawings combine with the notes taken by the collaborators and the audio recordings to become "psychogeographies," says Iain Kerr, one of the project coordinators and a spurse member. These psychogeographies are the units that make up a new map of the Maine coast, which goes beyond physical geography to include livelihoods and lifestyles, personal and community history, personal myths about the coast and much more.

"When we approached this project, we wanted to ask people very basic questions," says Kerr. "People are always talking about how much [the working waterfront] has changed. In a sense, we try and make ourselves mute to that. [We are asking,] 'what has changed... what are all the parts? How do they interact? Who is here?'"

The conversations went on for half an hour, one hour and up to two hours. Afterward visitor were invited to climb the steep steel stairwell to the top deck. There the sun beamed down on six hand-built machines that drew simple pictures as they responded to the movement of the boat, the wind and the waves. Two sets of speakers at either end of the deck projected the audio portions of the installation; a soundscape of the Portland waterfront and edited clips from earlier conversations about the Maine coast.


	Maps from earlier conversations hang above spurse member Stan Pipkin as he asks a visitor about life on the coast. Photo by Sara Nics.

The project began in the spring of 2004 when Elizabeth Sheehan and Stephen Cole from Coastal Enterprises Inc. began working on a public policy project to deepen understanding of Maine's working waterfronts; where people make a living by working between the ocean and the land. Sheehan says that from the beginning, they wanted to use art in the public realm to explore the loss of working waterfront in Maine.

Referred by colleagues, Sheehan and Cole approached Kerr and Rob Rosenthal, a radio documentarian from Shunpike Audio. Kerr then linked the project with the spurse collective, which includes dozens of people around the world.

Beginning in early summer, Rosenthal and spurse members held 50 to 60 interviews with people who work along the Maine coast, after which Rosenthal created the audio pieces. In early September, members of spurse came from around the United States to outfit the Maine Seacoast Mission's boat Sunbeam for the project. Others members unable to make the trip to Maine contributed ideas and plans, including design of the drawing machines. Finally, between September 14 and 19, the Sunbeam visited towns along the Maine coast: Port Clyde, Boothbay Harbor, Vinalhaven, Rockland, Stonington and Northeast Harbor.

Working waterfronts are shrinking all along the Maine coast, says Sheehan. That means it is harder to make a living lobstering, fishing and in other traditional coastal jobs. Although these issues spurred the project's initiation the collaborators say the end product - the interaction between the visitors, the coastal environment, the artists and installation aboard the Sunbeam - moved beyond the obvious to uncover the many-layered relationships people have with the coast.


	Two drawing machines on the deck of the Sunbeam. Photo by Sara Nics.

"At a certain point in these conversations and these drawings, not one moment in [the visitor's] life, but their whole life is revealed; all its connections to things," says Kerr. "It just suddenly all appears in this global way. Suddenly history explodes over."

While moving beyond public policy and preconceived notions the collaborators also crossed the ever-weakening distinctions between artistic disciplines. In the end, the project created multi-layered representations of participants' concepts of "coast" and a public art event.

"We're a living installation," says spurse member J. Morgran Puett, "We try to create an event that suddenly creates a new community. The people that come aboard are collaborating with us."

Sheehan, Cole, Rosenthal and the spurse collaborators are planning to transform the maps, drawings and edited audio into an installation that will travel, without the Sunbeam, to sites around Maine.

For more information about the project, please visit www.spurse.org/mappingmainecoasts.html.