July – Redwood Time Conjuring a New Dendrochronology

REDWOOD TIME
Conjuring a New Dendrochronology Fort Bragg, California 2023 – 2026

Join us for the month of July to view, interact with and participate in Redwood Time – a community project initiated by the Larry Spring Museum that centers around the C.R. Johnson Memorial Round and in particular, the dendrochronological timeline that is placed upon it.

We invite you to join us as we bring our community research to life through a series of craft gatherings — sewing, dyeing, and weaving a contemporary vision of time and local history into material form.

A schedule of work sessions is forthcoming.

Project Background:  Redwood Time is a project series that proposes a radical rereading of the C.R. Johnson Memorial Tree — the monumental Redwood Round that stands at the heart of Fort Bragg. The project draws into question our notions of individuality as we link ourselves together with complex histories, ecosystems and multi-species inhabitants.

We do this by collectively stitching together a fabric 1:1 scale maquette of the round, from fabrics of import to the community dyed in local plant and mushroom dyes, and populating it with new place-based timelines and conceptions of time. We ask, where did this tree come from, and what was its relationship to the soil, the minerals, the plants, animals, and machinery that both fed and disrupted its life? What are our human relationships to this ecological connective tissue? Are we in reciprocity?

In trying to re-imagine a new collective monument for today and tomorrow, what might be included? What narrative do Fort Bragg, its environs and inhabitants need to conjure from the tree rings now? What does the town need to commemorate, to remember, to celebrate and to mourn?

Current Stage: Through community gatherings to date, we have constructed the fabric model, embroidered tree rings, and explored planetary, soil, esoteric, and local histories that might be included on our new monument. We are now in the stage of synthesizing materials and research into timelines, timeways, and a new honoring and understanding of the past, present and our collective future.

Pacific Textile Arts has played a key role in Redwood Time – as the site of community dye gatherings to dye both the fabric used to construct the fabric model and the threads that are presently being used to stitch tree rings and mycelial networks on the round.

Bio + Statement
Redwood Time is a communal re-envisioning of the redwood round monument that stands in the center of Fort Bragg. Emerging from the Larry Spring Museum and carried forth by its magnetic and electrical impulses, Redwood Time has created a 1:1 fabric model of the redwood round as a portal for inquiry. By changing the lens on the portal, we can approach the round from myriad perspectives, including historical, ecological, sociological, environmental, and our favorite, the esoteric. The guides and seekers on this journey thus far include Anne Beck, Ursula Brookbank, Melissa Ferrari, Matilda Hernandez-Miyares, Anne Maureen McKeating, Nathan Maxwell Cann, MendoLatino (Diana Coryat and Loreto Rojas), Solange Roberdeau, Isabel Rucker, John Skinner, Jeff Solomon, Radek Tuma & Theatre de la Liberte, Shoshana Zambryski-Stachel, and the Larry Spring Museum community.

Redwood Time has received support from California Humanities, Community Foundation of Mendocino County, National Endowment for the Arts, Andy Warhol Foundation, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, and the Puffin Foundation. It is intended to culminate, as much as anything ever truly culminates, in the Fall of 2026 with a community wide presentation centered in Dry Shed #4 on the Georgia Pacific Mill Site.