I unfortunately missed Husk Lab’s Broom Making Workshop last month at Proteus Gowanus.
More photos of the event here.
More on the project in this post.
Someone is definitely getting one of these handmade brooms for Christmas.
Christina Kelly: Sweep
I met with Christina Kelly last week to talk about our two Gowanus projects.
She is growing broomcorn next to the Gowanus, actually at my “Site 1”. I saw it there before, but I didn’t know it was hers!
She says the growing is almost finished, and she’s bringing a craftsman in to make the corn into a traditional-style broom. The sculpture will be an artifact of a season of cultivating the material.
Additionally, through all the flooding and hurricanes, she discovered that as water drains into the canal, the corn acts as a sieve, catching debris and preventing it from entering the canal…just like a broom.
This is all very exciting to me. It embodies a lot of the same processes and values that my shrine project does … paying consistent attention over time, a marriage of symbolic and practical action, and an emphasis on the source of one’s material …
It’s also a beautiful echo of Agnes Denes’s “Wheatfield”.
Anne Percoco 