When I first visited SFAI, the first part of the school I saw was the meadow. I had been studying horticulture at Merritt College and finding this mysterious garden upon my arrival seemed very promising. I saw traces of how people were taking care of the space and I wanted to know more about it.

As a photographer at SFAI I worked in the photo lab, probably the most convenient area of the school for accessing the meadow. It’s just right outside the door, but no matter where I was on campus, I would find my way down to the meadow and spend a quiet moment there when I could. And I worked on many garden projects there.

The space was so important not only as a relief from student life but also from the urban environment. I feel like the meadow changed me as a gardener. Being at SFAI was a place of community for me, a solace, a place to connect to plants, to have a relationship to plants, and learn from them.

The lines of history in the meadow are what fascinate me most. I can't go there without thinking of everyone who has contributed to it. The plants people have brought or taken care of, the artwork that has been left behind, the redwood tree, they all carry echoes of everyone who has passed through the space.

I’m including three sets of images from my time as a photography student at SFAI.

Meadow Excavation is a series of photos I gathered into a zine. It was an assignment for Lindsey White’s comedy class, Laughing Matters. After talking to Genine [Lentine] about the things she was digging up in the meadow, I was fascinated by this process of unearthing all these strange objects, so I wanted to do a “meadow excavation” in one small section, dedicating my archaeological dig to a limited space, approximately 4-by-4-foot space.

I chose this one spot at the bottom of the meadow.  I didn’t even know if I’d find anything, but I found so many things, including a blue silk scarf. I found it about three feet under, the deepest of anything I found. I saw the corner of it. Different parts of it were coming up. I didn’t want to dig into it and rip it, so I gently pulled it out.  I ended up leaving it on the bench. Maybe whoever left it there will return, three decades later?

Meadow Snapshots. These are simply photos I’ve taken on my phone, snapshots to remember moments in the meadow, different things happening there, a way of recording changes, people interacting with it. Some photos record visitors passing through, a student, or the hawk that perched nearby one afternoon while we worked on the compost. Others record the process of working on a meadow project, for example, the shadow planting with the buckeye, or a day with arborists Eric Folmer and Tico Ramirez. 

Meadow Work Day is a set of black-and-white film photos. I wanted to have some nice film photos of the meadow, and I wanted to do some formal photos of people working in the meadow. I took these when Carol Manahan’s biology class was having a work day establishing some native grasses. In these photos we see a lot of students contributing, and you really get the sense of people helping out in different ways.

 LK 

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Secondary Connections