Hi! We are a long time posting, but we wanted to share some of our thoughts and pics from our excellent trip to Matfield Outpost this past Summer, July 2015. We are Blake and Hannah March Sanders, two peas in the pod of Orange Barrel Industries, a collaborative print and curatorial partnership. We are currently based in Cape Girardeau, MO, where Hannah is an Assistant Professor and Area Head of Printmaking, and Blake is an Instructor in Foundations.

We also have a 15 month old, Levee, who was 7 months at the time of our trip. He had so much fun exploring and taking naps!

We bought all of our groceries on the way in, and decided to stick to what we’d gotten and see how far we could stretch it. We lived like kings on black-eyed peas and chicken salad, roast chicken and rice, chicken soup, and many other iterations of chicken, rice, and beans with fruit and veggies. The cabin is so well stocked with food, toys, linens, games, and especially books! I had plenty of ideas on what to request with my next library grant after perusing the cabin’s shelves and finding way more interesting books than I could ever read in one week!

We spent the week reading, drawing, crocheting, and taking lots of long walks to see the countryside. We were working on preparing pieces for an exhibition, Pray for Oil, to be held at the Arts Council of Southeast Missouri in October 2015.

The crochet project by Blake became the piece Gargantua, which you can check out on his website, here: http://orangebarrelindustries.com/blake/main/projects/gargantua/

The pics below show the development of part of a collaborative Orange Barrel Industries installation entitled, Domestic Dependence, http://orangebarrelindustries.com/blake/main/projects/domestic-dependence/