Exhibit features images of farm tools from around Maine

FARMINGTON — The first exhibit at the University of Maine at Farmington’s Emery Community Arts Center Flex Space Gallery as it reopens is the “Farm Tools Project.”
The exibit is a visual exploration of the use of hand tools on small farms, using cyanotype images, by Michel Droge and Sarah Loftus, and will be on display in the Emery Flex Space Gallery and on the Emery website through Oct. 1.
According to University safe return plans, gallery hours will initially be on a limited basis, and patrons are encouraged to check Emery’s website for updated open hours, at wpsites.maine.edu/emerycommunityartscenter. [1]
All visitors are required to wear masks and maintain social distancing while in Emery and the Flex Space Gallery.
Over the last year artist Droge and archaeologist Loftus traveled around the state with a portable cyanotype kit, a 19th century form of non-toxic photography, creating images of tools with people in their fields, barns and greenhouses. They talked with farmers about their practices, the significance of the tools they choose to use and how they engage with the earth to produce and harvest food.
Loftus has been researching American farming and the material culture of daily life for many years. Droge is a research-based artist with a socially engaged practice that addresses the environment and climate change. They decided to collaborate to look at the material choices people make on small farms, the labor of it, and the objects they pick up each day to grow food and maintain sustainable relationships with the land.
Tools are embedded with their own histories and stories, extensions of ourselves and partners in our complicated relationships with the world. They have their own animus, but also speak to humanity’s collective capacity for invention and ingenuity.
As with farming, cyanotypes are produced with sunlight and water, and speak to generational relationships with the land and the enduring resilience of small farms facing a suite of environmental, social and industrial challenges.
The exhibition is moving around the state; 50 percent of artwork sales proceeds will go to Real Farmer Care, which raises moneys for self-care for farmers who need it and the remaining 50 percent will go towards publication of a book for the project.
The Farm Tools Project is funded in part by a grant from the Maine Arts Commission and by the Kindling Fund, a grant program administered by SPACE as part of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Regranting Program
Participating farms were Black Kettle Farm, Lyman; Burke Hill Farm, Cherryfield; College of the Atlantic’s Peggy Rockefeller Farm, Mount Desert Island; Four Season Farm, Harborside; Frith Farm, Scarborough; Girard Farm, Lyman; Hurricane Valley Farm, West Falmouth; Ironwood Farm, Albion; Villageside Farm, Freedom.