Lanesboro Artist-in-residence Chloe Bischoff will be hosting an open story sharing opportunity at the Lanesboro Arts Gallery from 10 am – 1 pm on Saturday, April 25th during the Bluff Country Studio Tour! Drop by Chloe’s table to share stories about your relationship to the land beneath our feet. 

Chloe is collecting stories about your connection to the local land to inform her residency project. Their residency invites participants to consider soil not as an inert material, but as an active presence shaped by geology, ecology, labor, and memory. They ask: where do you see these themes in your own life? How do you connect to the soil in significant places in your life?

Chloe will also connect with folks around their residency project and workshops. The stories shared here will help inform Chloe’s final residency project, a collection of personalized tokens that relate to Lanesboro residents’ relationships to the local land. While you make your way through the Bluff Country Studio Art Tour, make sure you stop and say hello!

About Chloe Bischoff

Chloe Bischoff is a sculptor and ceramicist whose work investigates the millennia-old relationship between humans and clay. Their work investigates this relationship, beholding clay as an emissary of matter through which to explore themes of animism, selfhood, and queer ecology—concepts that dissolve boundaries between living and nonliving entities and reimagine nature as an non-hierarchical, entangled network of vibrant matter. Chloe sees their process as reciprocal interaction between themself and the clay, a series of ritual encounters between two entities rather than as a utilization of an inert medium.

About the Residency

Chloe’s residency project examines the relationship between the inhabitants of a place and the physical materials of that place.  Everything from Lanesboro’s geography to its built environment have been shaped by the people and materials which exist there, from the steep bluffscapes that shape the river valley to the rich historical brick facades downtown. To explore this entanglement, Chloe will invite community members to collect soil samples from significant places in their lives, and incorporate them into clay to create a series of ceramic tokens. The resulting collection of sculptures will tell a story about Lanesboro’s human and material community. Learn More about Chloe’s Residency here.

The Lanesboro Early Career Artist Residency Program is Supported by the Jerome Foundation.