Drift, 2014
Reedsburg, Wisconsin
Wormfarm Institute’s Fermentation Fest
Drift is both an autonomous intervention in the landscape and a site for exchange with residents and visitors. This floating sculptural form advances to shore on weekends where the artists will serve spring infusions made from local market farm produce harvested this fall, in frozen glacial water harvested from Exit Glacier in Alaska. Alaska’s remaining glaciers are the site of furthest retreat of the Innuitian Ice sheet that once cloaked this region.
Drift is simultaneously a functional bar serving frozen infusions, the shadow image of the region’s ancient glacial past and the suggestion of vernacular architecture, a hoop house form, familiar to the region. Drift crosses, both figuratively and through the body, the driftless region’s geological story with its current agricultural land use. In this, Drift aims to merge the ready-at-hand with the distant and receding in a complex ecology.
