Although Henry David Thoreau’s "Walden" is generally treated as a paean to solitude and self-reliance, it would never have been written without his lifelong dialogue with close friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. This paradox was the basis for my piece “Re-Surveying Walden,” created as part of the DeCordova Museum’s exhibit "Walden, Revisited" in 2014.

While living at Walden, Thoreau was periodically employed as a land surveyor, and he produced a survey of the pond during his tenure there. In direct relation to Thoreau’s friend/mentor relationship with Emerson and his work as a surveyor, I invited six friends to mentor me in a collaborative, poetic “re-surveying” of the pond. Each “project mentor” read selections from "Walden" and designed a process for engaging with the site. The boat, a center for this work, was my corollary to Thoreau’s cabin: a hand-built framing device through which to see and experience the world.

All six project mentors were women, all friends with whom I have longstanding artistic dialogues. The project produced a collaborative, hybrid mode of exploration, a feminist approach in deliberate counterpoint to the myth of Thoreauvian self-reliance. Results of the “survey” (audio recording, drawings, and writing) were exhibited alongside the boat.

Project Mentors:
Caitlin Berrigan, interdisciplinary artist
Kathy Couch, interdisciplinary designer
Karinne Keithley Syers, interdisciplinary performance
artist and writer
Candice Salyers, choreographer
Sara Smith, choreographer, artist, librarian
Kate Wellspring, natural history museum curator