For my final semester of my MFA at the Vermont College of Fine Arts I set out to find a balance between the personal and the political. I intended to explore my father's farm in rural Northern Kentucky as a way to question how corporate farming models were destroying the family farm in America. What I discovered as I began my inquisition was a much more complicated relationship between the farmer, environment, and local and national business interests. I also discovered that many of the artifacts I investigated were triggering memories that I had long forgotten. It has become a complicated inquiry into the way that memory and perspective can shape our politics, and the role that the land, the very earth itself, plays in a complex relationship between a gravel pit, my father and me.



Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Expansion Revised

So, I felt like the previous map that showed the expansion of the gravel pit was difficult to read and didn't quite get to the gravity of the shifting borders on my father's farm.

I have created a new version of the map with color and I think it clears things up. The greens are "natural" spaces, meaning trees and grazing pastures. The browns are fields where cultivation is occurring. The yellows are the gravel pit.

Notice that, as the gravel pit expands, a higher percentage of the land is shifting to cultivated fields and the space available for free grazing is decreasing.

Posted by Roderick Vesper at 8:51 PM

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