Artisode; 2.4; Patrick Dougherty

I guess the best way for me to explain what you're doing is actually utilizing product. Utilizing everything left over and I saw on his preference some things here in the kitchen and as you saw in the bins over there all that leftover product just a few years ago was going in the lampills. So we're realizing society we need to do something more than just dump it. Get it out of sight out of mile. We need to utilize it and that's the ultimate of what's happening. Anyway it's just it's grabbing and utilizing and going with it. The original concepts for culture digest was the fact that we were both farmers

coming from an art background and we wanted to figure out how to integrate both of those practices and the key to both of those practices was sort of a creativity that was embedded in the soil and in the earth around us. We've been calling it the art laboratory because there's just all kinds of things going on in here and once I collect organic material from various areas of campus I bring it in here and I work on these still life compositions and this sort of might be a little makeshift photo studio. It's given everybody a place to sort of enter into this dialogue and so

really the viewer is as much a part if not the part of this is making it art as the structure is itself or the installation or environment that we've created. It's kind of like a literal seed of hope you know a little house that can grow beyond its own walls and I think what this does is inspire artists who are maybe confused and thinking about what's going on the environment and the economy and it gives them a place to land and grow.