Seeking Inspiration and Making Art During a Pandemic
With my normal avenues of travel and exploration on hold due to the global pandemic, but still needing to get out of the house and into nature to clear my head, a natural nearby point of interest is the Dunlap Coke Ovens.
I studied not just the ovens and their outward, mossy appearance, but the very stones they were made from and the surrounding park, built by the local historical society to preserve and honor that past.
I made rubbings, carefully and with preservation in mind, but trying to seek out the details I wouldn’t necessarily glean just from looking.
Several trips to the Coke Ovens for lots of little studies had me wondering not just about the Ovens themselves, but also the lives of the people who lived around and worked at the ovens. The people who mined, what their lives were like. What else would they have lived through.
To keep a very long story short, I realized that the time when people were working these Coke Ovens, not only were they also fighting World War 1, but also battling their own pandemic, the Influenza outbreaks of 1918. Roughly half the deaths in this war were from sickness in camps, both from this awful flu and other things like tuberculosis, pneumonia, and gonorrhea.
But it was during this research I decided to take a leap towards a project I’ve wanted to started for quite some time- the ground work for a novel about the life of a queer soldier and miner from WWI. I plucked imagery from the Ovens, from materials I could find on war in the time, and the lives of extremely rural communities through some ephemera from around the same time.
I’ve worked on stringing together a story line for my historically challenged soldier; what his life might have looked like, where he might have settled, and how he might have lived after the war.
However, after long enough, several months, of researching these fairly depressing times, I think I need to change focus. Though this research has been highly satisfying and I have learned more than I could have hoped- and with plenty left to discover- I am going to bookmark this one for now.
My next train of thought departs in the direction of these arches I’m so familiar with, but I am intending to explore more fantastical elements. For instance, how do these ruin arches, which have crumbled for decades and yet still stand, play parts in urban fantasy?
If I were to view this archway with its short step and trod path as a portal instead of a oven window, where would it take me?
The possibilities of these marvelous ruins as doorways to imagination has kept me afloat creatively all semester. From the first rough sketches, through the process of taking rubbings of surfaces, and into the creation of a whole imaginary being and his life, these arches have been gateways. Now it’s time to step through and see what there is to find on the other side.
