Katherine Hair Eagle
Katherine Hair Eagle was an artist-in-residence at Prairieside Outpost in January 2023, traveling from Tulsa, Oklahoma. During her residency, Katherine focused on a unique site-specific work that was activated by the wind across the prairie landscape. The stillness and subtlety of winter prairie landscape underscored the quiet beauty of this new work.
When I first got to the cottage, my sense was that the landscape was resting and that may have been true, but as I became familiar with my surroundings, I started to become aware of movement all around me. White tail deer and hawks investigated each new iteration of my work as I moved things around in the field. New tracks came close to the cottage in the barely thawed mud each evening, to be discovered refrozen every morning. Even though the crunch of snow was still evident where the ground stayed shaded, new emergence was imminent. Birds darted through the open air.
The windsocks each mirror the land and the sky, and this struck me especially on my last morning. Sunrise was a bright patch of orange, and one windsock in my line of sight also flashed a bright patch of orange. Goldenrod, from a ditch in Illinois.
By evening, when the air from the day’s thermals began to relax, the windsocks move gently. In this air, a sweet spot of 5-15mph, the windsocks agree on direction. There are no violent switches, no rigid fabric. My dad would call that “wonder wind”.
Winter in the Flint Hills is quiet. The shadows are long and the nights are longer. The drive to the cottage is so scenic, the dormant prairie grasses are made even more golden by the late afternoon light. Meadowlark, cattle and horses dot the views. I feel a sense of urgency to reach the cottage before dusk settled all the way in to night.
The project that brought me here is one rooted in both lightness and grief. I am interested in making invisible things visible, and one of the ways I am doing that is with windsocks. Wind indicators have been familiar and important to me my entire life, because they were familiar and important to my dad. This project is, in no small part, an effort to process his sudden death, and for so many reasons windsocks seem to be the perfect language for something that I have no words for.
I set out to sew a few more windsocks, and the back porch was the perfect workspace for that. Working with fabrics that I had dyed with plants from the remaining prairies of Illinois and Oklahoma, I thought about the ways these prairies would have been continuous and connected, before roads and agriculture cut them apart. I wondered if they share watersheds. Looking out across the pasture, I watched the wind move the windsocks that were already out, and considered that they the remaining dots of grassland are still connected by the ever-flowing air.
Each windsock becomes a map of its own before it is sewn into form. Each swatch of color is a shift in landscape. As I continued piecing fabrics on my second full day in the cottage, the quick transition from light to dark in the late afternoon snuck up on me. Evening announced itself with a striking show of pinks and purples as the depth of the night crept across the sky. Deer travelled their well-worn paths, and I watched as they bedded down within the stand of windsocks. The next morning was clear and bright, and the deer had already moved on by the time I was installing the newest additions.
