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On a privately owned 90-acre island in Lake Superior, a budding organization aims to create an environmentally sustainable, off-the-grid artist residency.
ORIGIN
Having spent childhood summers in the copper country of Northern Michigan, Rob Gorski, now a doctor in New York, began looking to purchase a piece of land to re-connect with his roots in 2009 when he happened upon a Craigslist ad for Rabbit Island: an uninhabited island three miles off the coast of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, owned by a local German-American woman who had left it undeveloped since purchasing it in the ’60s.
Gorski immediately saw that it was a special place; as an environmentalist, he also felt it important that the island retain its wild beauty. With the owner and with Keweenaw Land Trust, he began working to set up a conservation easement that would ensure that the island would remain un-subdivided into perpetuity. The easement also greatly reduced the tax rate, making it affordable for Gorski to purchase in 2010.
“Writing the conservation easement was almost like [writing] the constitution of the entire place. It facilitates what we can do and also honors the natural character of the land,” Gorski explained. Nevertheless, it wasn’t until shortly after he’d purchased it that he and a friend, London-based artist Andrew Ranville, came up with the idea of turning it into a location for an artist residency.
Three years later, it’s become a haven for anyone content to trade rough living for the joys of creating away from the distractions of civilization. Rabbit Island now contains two simple living structures made from local cedar, with a third under development, without running water or electricity. Around 15 artists have now visited Rabbit Island for varying periods of time, and Northern Michigan’s DeVos Art Museum has agreed to host a yearly group show of work created on the residencies.
ALTERNATIVE HOW
From its foundations to its guiding ideology, Rabbit Island challenges the status quo. Its environmental easement removes it from the realm of financial profit; it can never be divided or developed, preserving it indefinitely as a space for creative and scientific inquiry.
The limited resources require visitors and artists-in-residence to carefully consider what to bring onto the island: everything from what to cook and tools for creation. “Nothing can have a by-product that is going to mar the landscape, so it makes it an interesting place to contemplate one’s practice,” Gorski said.
Gorski asks artists, as producers, to evaluate the ethics and merits of their work. “You can take whatever you’ve learned, whatever intellect you’ve gathered from the world, but then what are you going to when there’s nothing there?” he said. “Will it be interesting, or will it not be?”
WHY IT WORKS
While the island’s purchase was funded entirely by Gorski, additional financial support for the residency program was facilitated by Kickstarter, which raised over $14,000 to go towards power tools and materials for the structures.
For the most part, artists pay their own way onto the island — some through crowdsourcing, and others through personal funds — but once they’ve arrived, the lack of expenses makes it a relatively low-cost experience. Additionally, Gorski and Ranville are creating a platform for artists to sell work created on the island online, as a source of revenue to cover their expenses from the residency and donating the remainder to support additional conservation endeavors.
Rabbit Island has already attracted an eclectic group of artists and thinkers, from Michigan musicians who have come to the island to record to multimedia artist and open-water swimmer Sara Maynard, who trained for a swim and worked on photography while in residence last summer. This year’s residency will include Liz Clark, a professional surfer who has been sailing solo around the world since 2006 and is planning to begin writing a book on the island.
Gorski doesn’t expect that the projects that come out of the island will or should necessarily relate to conservancy; rather, that they underscore the importance of having wild places to create in. “I’m aware that in the end works produced out there could not be relevant,” he said, “but there is a potential, given the right interpretation, for it to be really special.” He added, “I want it to be a social project that can reflect back on society.”
To see images of Rabbit Island, click on the slideshow.