Those who have spent some time perusing my Keswick House Publishers blog or have read my post “The Search for Etheric Generator, Part I,” know that I love a good treasure hunt. In fact, when I was a kid, my brother and sister and I staged mock Easter egg hunts weeks before the actual event. I love it when life is full of fun pleasant surprises, but all too often the surprises in our lives are unpleasant ones. And the whole Unabomber/Terrorist horribleness has cast an awful shadow on our expectations related to stumbling upon something curious. Part of the art cache treasure hunt aspect of The Last Good Fairy project was to counteract, in my own small way, this disheartening development in human history.
With the economic downturn affecting so many people, and the past year containing so many unpleasant surprises in Richard’s and my life-as well as the lives of many of our loved ones-I wanted to do something to balance things out, however I could. I thought it would be fun to borrow the Easter egg hunt idea and apply it to the winter holiday season.
To that end, I have made found object ornaments suitable for hanging. They are pictured above. One ornament is two-sided; the rest are one-sided. They are hanging along the public Lema Ranch (Secluded and Leah’s) paths at The McConnell Foundation headquarters. To look for them, start at the parking lot at Shasta View and Hemingway (directions can be found on the McConnell website; click on “Download PDF Map”), across from Mountain View Middle School.
You don’t have to go searching for them if you’re in their vicinity. You can spot them if you’re looking carefully. All the ornaments are within easy walking distance of the parking lot (a couple are visible from the parking lot itself), and do not require going off the trails to find or see. Keep in mind that the wind will twist the ornaments and they may be at right angles to your line of sight; in addition, some are easier to spot than others. Please stay on the trail; it’s very generous of McConnell to host this installation and I would hate for it to cause any grief for them.
If you fall in love with one of them, you can take it home with you; or you can leave them in place for others to view. I’m sure I don’t need to say this, but just in case: If you do take an ornament, please take only one and leave the others for someone else. Be mindful that, if you take down an ornament, you don’t poke yourself with the metal wire; some small wire snips might not be a bad idea to bring along. Retrieve the art at your own risk, of course, and be sure not to leave any of the wire behind if you do use snips. The copper wire is easier to unwind than the aluminum wire.
If anyone who reads this finds any of them and would like to let me know and give me any thoughts or comments you might have, please e-mail me at keswickhouse@earthlink.net. (Some of my friends have asked about the fact that you can’t leave comments on my Keswick blog. The reason is that my software is local-iWeb-not-server-based, and when my adorable niece helped me to set this up, I wasn’t planning on having a blog. So I will need to change my set-up to be able to accept comments. But in the meantime, it’s easy to send me an e-mail and it’s easy for me to post your comments.)
I’ll post any results that I hear about. It is possible that the ornaments will be discovered simply by someone observant who doesn’t know about this project and so I won’t know about it. But if I do hear from anyone, I’ll let you know.
And if this turns out to be as much fun as I hope it will, this might not be the last of my guerilla art cache treasure hunts.
To any interested treasure hunters: Whether you find an ornament or not, I hope you have fun looking!
Many thanks to Shannon Phillips and the McConnell Foundation for their support in hosting this treasure hunt and their continued support of public art!
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Celeste White is an artist, writer, publisher, scientist and holistic health expert. She lives in far northern California with her husband.
