CALL 206-426-5613 • SEPTEMBER 21 - OCTOBER 12 • TELL A STORY ABOUT BEING HOME OR AWAY ON THE GREAT PLAINS

Dear Callers,

I am collecting stories about the Great Plains for a sound installation at the annual Art Harvest here at the Art Farm in Marquette, Nebraska on October 24 and 25. Maybe you’ve lived on the plains for your entire life, maybe you arrived recently, or maybe you’ve only traveled through in a bus, a train, a car. Maybe your grandparents passed along letters or stories about traveling the plains by choice or force or economic necessity. As a Californian with generations-ago roots on the plains, I experience the landscape here as a pile-up of stories, conflicting versions of similar events. How about you?

I invite you to leave a brief, anonymous phone message about a prairie journey of any kind. You are welcome to talk about something handed down across generations or something all your own, to describe a long voyage or a small transformation or a change in perspective, to record ducks flying overhead or imitate the sound of a cat giving birth in a barn, to sing-yell the words of a broken treaty—whatever you are moved to contribute.

The Hollow Tree Line got its name from a trip that I took with my family the year after my grandfather died. In Council Grove, Kansas, near where he was born, there is a hollow tree still standing where pioneers in wagon trains used to leave letters for travelers coming along behind them. We talked with hog farming cousins who had stayed in the area and visited the old family house, and I later learned that Council Grove was the site of a treaty signing between the US Government and the Osage tribe, an important turning point in the often violent history of western expansion. What were we hoping to find there? Maybe we went to Kansas as a way of trying to connect with Bert, as if the hollow tree might have held one last letter from him, sent across an impossible threshold.

Now I am spending two months away from my California home as an artist-in-residence at a farm on the Nebraska plains—not too far, relative to California, from where my great-great-grandparents homesteaded. There’s a dip in the prairie nearby where the Oregon Trail passed through. We rip out old phone lines and climb the barn roof chasing cell phone signals.

In light of this weird confluence, I am interested in the traces we leave of the journeys that we take, and the ways that our efforts to communicate mark the landscape. How do we connect across this space of the prairies, whether we are the ones leaving home, or the ones staying behind?

I thank you so much for reading, and hope that you will call The Hollow Tree Line at 206-426-5613, and that you will ask your grandma and your neighbor and your kids to call as well. I will post the final sound collage on this site at the end of the project.

Sincerely,

Amanda Davidson
amanda.davidson@mac.com | partedinthemiddle.com | artfarmnebraska.org | photo by tiff mich