Who

China Tresemer at Hiyu Wine Farm

I am an artist whose medium is a farm. My paints, canvas, and brushes are fruit trees, wine grapes, electric fencing, flower bulbs, chickens, cover crops, beef bones, and microorganisms. And watercolor and ink. Included are spaces and structures for humans to interact with this work, such as gardens and dining experiences. My work is collaborative — with many people, and primarily with the Earth. In the two-dimensional, I create imagery to do with this work, including a series of over 50 wine labels — tiny compositions in watercolor, ink, collage, and gilding—which, sent out on thousands of bottles around the world, tell a symbolic story of the farm.

I see my farming as art because I think farming is worthy of that kind of attention. I make paintings and design gardens, but I have also milked cows, turned compost piles, and hauled in the squash harvest in the quest to grow food. It’s all part of one effort to live in contact and collaboration with the Earth. Learning a piece of land has taught me more about cooking than any book or chef or dining experience. The land indicates rhythms and cycles; it shows me history and context; it demands my labor in cycles, attuning my appetite.

I found my way here through cooking and the culture of food and the table. From fine art training at Parsons School of Design in Paris and in New York City, an internship with Slow Food USA led to two years travel with Peggy Markel’s Culinary Adventures exploring foodways in Tuscany, Sicily, and Morocco. Later I co-founded Meadowlark Farm Dinners, cooking dinners in farmers’ fields out of a school-bus-turned-kitchen. In 2008 I moved to Oregon and co-founded Hiyu Wine Farm. Here the culture of the table is integrated with growing gardens, raising animals, designing and planting food forests, making wine and sharing this experience around the world. 

What

Grist and gleanings from a way of life in collaboration with the Earth

Still Life with Field Notes is my offering of images and insights about living with the land. It’s about listening to the land, designing and creating systems, and spaces, and stories that convey use and beauty as one in the same. It’s about reclaiming the notion of what it is a farm. A farm is a place that not only feeds me and an entire community, but encompasses, produces, and evolves, allowing us to live within the ‘artwork’, to be continually creating and editing, nurturing some nascent inspiration or deciding an element has reached its successional climax. A farm is an organism that interacts with larger forces — from the economic to the social to the more-than-human. It’s a way of life that requires staying attuned to the seasons as reflected in the natural world; in our cycles of life; and as told in the sky by constellations and planets taking their patterned pathways.

How

The format of Still Life with Field Notes is a drawing and an entry about a moment in the year. It’s a cross section of the ‘lasagna compost’ of the farm, of this way of life: the disintegrating, fermenting, germinating, fruitful sequence of rhythms and cycles. The entries are meant as a succession — through accumulation and my own process of discovery I share my view from the farm and its focal point, the kitchen, and the unfolding patterns of the natural world. Each marks a moment in the cycle of the more-than-four-seasons. Each is meant as an emblem or icon of that moment. Over the course of the year, the moments will collect into a whole, like a deck of tarot cards, a lens, or myth through which to view the world, one which posits a more attuned, collaborative path for our lives and the Earth.

My hope is that you can use these small stories to remember the cycle of the unfolding year, the rhythm of a farm life, and the food that reminds us daily of our connections.

Please respond in the comments section and subscribe, below, to stay tuned.