Out in May Back by October explores the balance between extractive and sustainable approaches to nature. Made primarily from abandoned newsprint sourced from the ruins of the East Millinocket paper mill, Hart’s drawings and installations variously combine recycled, reclaimed, remade, and commercially made paper, ink, and water. The show’s title evokes the spring-to-fall season of the river drives that, for generations, moved thousands of trees from the forest of northern Maine, down the Penobscot River, to the factories in which timber was pulped, bleached, and milled into paper.
A central piece of the installation is Out in May Back by October, an 8.5’ x 12’ hand-beaded portrait of Harts’ paternal grandparents, Robert Fraser and Mary Metallic, who met on the Listuguj (then Restigouche) Mi’gmaq First Nation reserve during a Great Northern Paper Company recruitment drive. Each bead in this monumental portrait was handmade by the artist by systematically tearing, weighing, and repulping mill paper. She fashioned the pulp into over 8,000 beads, dyed them in shades of gray, drilled them, and beaded them in 22 sections on a loom—a technique her Native aunt and mother taught her in order to make bracelets as a child.
The rhythm of extraction and recycling underlies another work in the show: Hart’s series, 109 Dyewater Ink Drop Drawings. With one drawing made for each mile of the Penobscot, the drawings combine waste ink used to color the beads in “Out in May Back by October,” recycled water from the bead-making process (much of it reclaimed from the air using a dehumidifier), and machine-made archival watercolor paper.
How many skies to blow back
scatter
this staining.
This collection
of stains.
Other pieces in the show include hand-fringed wall hangings cut from reclaimed mill paper and an interactive piece consisting of two rolls of mass-produced Kraft paper. Over the course of the show, one roll will be systematically unwound, bit by bit, so that the paper accumulates, pools, and winds like a river across the gallery. The other roll, screen printed multiple times with the lines “Out in May Back by October. All dried out. Neat as a Pin,” will be mounted with instructions inviting viewers to tear and remove a section of it. As one work spills out, the other recedes.
Out in May Back by October is a visual counterpoint to Hart’s forthcoming debut poetry collection, Boomhouse (The 3rd Thing Press, 2023.) As described by the press, Boomhouse “thrums with loss, with complicated love, with fortitude. The poems travel a chain of rivers and lakes from the great timber stands of Canada to the dying mill towns of Maine, bending and rippling through history, oral accounts, superstitious customs, family lore and memory. Summer J. Hart navigates the twisting dynamics of a family that is both Native and settler. She weaves stories and spells from the most delicate and indelible details.” The poems from Boomhouse and visual works in Out in May back by October are inextricably bound.
Hart writes, “My work is about obsessiveness and obsession, memory, identity, and longing.” She is as much concerned with the manufacture of her pieces as the visual outcomes. Her processes: meticulous fringing, counting, factory-line painting, counting, beadmaking, counting, and printing mimic the intense labor, coordination, and repetition of turning forest to newspaper.
The artist thanks the East Millinocket Chamber of Commerce.