‘The Resurrection Project’ reimagines park’s junk pile
BIG RIVER » In these coopedup times spent sheltering in our homes, the Mendocino Headlands State Park offers a chance to get out into nature to breathe freely, and to swim, kayak or canoe the Big River.
Beside the river wends the Haul Road — perfect for hiking and biking beneath the trees and beside the blackberry bushes and ferns.
For a long time, a pile of twisted metal and plastic piping has befouled the beautiful, natural landscape about a mile upriver from the easternmost parking lot. The junk has sat there, rusted, jagged, ugly, like a garbage dump from a long-ago construction project.
Now local resident, Susan Maeder, 76, has begun crafting art from this refuse, working each day on what she calls “The Resurrection Project.”
Maeder has lived in Mendocino for forty years and you may have seen her on stage at the Mendocino Theatre Company as an actor and playwright in the past. She’s also a published poet, so you may be surprised to find her offstage and away from her desk, dragging around broken metal
culverts and mashed scraps of plastic on the Haul Road.
“I'd been disgruntled for the longest time at the trash heap of discarded culverts cast off to the side of our path,” Maeder said. “An eyesore to say the least, even a sort of desecration of the landscape.”
Maeder said she's not quite sure what inspired her to wander into the rusted chaos a few months ago, and begin to drag out individual sections of the debris.
“The first time I extricated something and stood it on end and saw the potential for a raw kind of ‘art' in all this, I was hooked,” she said. “My Bay Area friend (and former longtime Mendocino resident) Tracy Burns, and I spent hours constructing the first installations of what (Burns) wanted to call ‘Dirty Art.'”
Maeder said she and Burns had “a wonderful time,” unearthing dragons and angels and a number of other spirits. However, when she returned to the site a few days later — almost everything had been toppled.
“I began again,” she said. “I spent an hour or so every day constructing what is there now.”
One unknown contributor came by overnight and added his own art. More and more people began to stop and take photos and make comments.
Someone asked Maeder what she called it and she came up with “The Resurrection Project” on the spot.
Why The Resurrection Project?
“Sounds a bit lofty, doesn't it?” Maeder said. “But to me it feels akin to what we are doing as a nation right now, trying to make something considered, something with a deliberate eye toward healing and beauty, out of what has happened to us.”
Maeder said there's nothing she hopes to accomplish with the project, but rather just to create and feel inspired. “People stop. We talk to each other through our masks,” she said. “Some even say thank you for doing this. Really, I couldn't be happier.”
The Resurrection Project can be found by hiking or biking out to the Big River Haul Road. Hurry before it's gone, and you might even get lucky and see Maeder hard at work — making art out of junk.
“People — mostly men, I note — are quick to remind me that ‘ they' will come back someday and haul it all away,” she said. “Of course they will. But it's here right now. While I'm working on it, I get to hear little kids call out“Mom! Dad! Look! Is that art??” How great is that?”