In 2017 artist Arlene Morris and her husband, retired doctor and civil engineer Steve Stern, hired the Kennebec Cabin Company, best known for its Maine Cabin Masters TV show, to rescue a historic clam-processing shack they had bought on Bunganuc Creek near their home in Brunswick.
Visiting the site, Chase Morrill and his “family of Mainers,” as the show describes them, discovered a structure in severe disrepair. The subsequent TV show (season 2, episode 1) highlights how they managed to resurrect this iconic two-story structure.
In December 2023, Morris and friend and fellow artist Rebecca Goodale began work on Where To?, a limited edition book that would invite readers to consider the effects of climate change on this coastal landmark, which sits plunk on the tidal creek and faces the ocean.
On their first visit to the shack, they experienced the full-on rush of an incoming tide combined with heavy rain, thunder, and lightning.
“While the storm raged around us,” Goodale recounts, “we talked about the climate crisis and the changes to the landscape in our lifetimes and our fear of loss, and more loss to come.”
Where To? consists of seven two-sided panels—“pages”—that fit into a slotted board. One side, in blues, black, white, and gray, offers a sunlit shack on a calm day while the opposite side represents troubled times via a palette of hot pink, orange, hot green, and red. An image of a bright orange life preserver is set in the top of the presentation box, with a larger version pasted down inside the lid.
Goodale and Morris invite the reader to assemble the panels “to create a specific place during this climate crisis.” The panels can be arranged, they note, “to suit [the reader’s] aesthetic preferences”—and, one might add, their vision of the fate of this coastal outpost where clams harvested nearby were once handled.
When assembled, the book provides a lively layered vision of the shack.
Various creatures, including crabs, fish, raccoons, a heron, an owl, a buck, and a bear, appear on the panels. A figure desperately reaching for a life ring is the most direct reference to the peril we face.
Even as the piece portends future flooding, there is something almost celebratory about the animated imagery.
The panels include historic references, including a “No Nukes” sign that hung on the side of the building for many years to protest the Maine Yankee nuclear power plant in Wiscasset.
The book project was an all-Maine team effort. The panels and base were silkscreened and hand-colored in Goodale’s Freeport studio and machine-sewn at Morris’s Topsham studio. Scott Mullenberg at Mullenberg Designs in Portland created the boxes while Scott Vile at Ascensius Press in Bar Mills came up with the type design for the prospectus which was letterpress printed.
Goodale and Morris brought their wide-ranging art-making skills to the project, including printmaking, fiber work, and book design. Where To? asks an important question for our times in a manner that is both brilliant and compelling.
More information about Goodale and Morris can be found on their websites, www.rebeccagoodale.com and www.arlenemorris.com.
Carl Little is the author most recently of Blanket of the Night: Poems (Deerbrook Editions) and the monograph John Moore: Portals (Marshall Wilkes).
