Artist Melissa Jones recently moved back to Sebastopol from Oregon, where she had just finished her Masters in Visual Arts at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Her Master’s thesis project, called “A house without a key,” consisted of several elaborately knitted, pod-like, hanging structures that looked vaguely like the nests of the Eurasian Penduline Tit. [We heard that giggle.]
Jones said she has never heard of that particular bird, but said, “I did look at the way weaverbirds make their nests.”
“Anyway, I had gotten really into weaving, and I really wanted to see it out in open space,” Jones said.
First she reached out to the Laguna de Santa Rosa Foundation, but the tree where she wanted to display her work was on city of Sebastopol property along the Joe Rodota Trail, so they referred her to the city.
“So I wrote a proposal to the city of Sebastopol asking if I could temporarily hang my pods in a tree for a month. I was going to do it from August til September.”
Public Works gave her the thumbs up.
“So I hung them up, and they looked really cool,” she said.
They did. Lots of people thought so. Over the last week, I saw pictures of them pop up on Nextdoor and Facebook.
And then a few days ago, a friend of Jones wrote the Sebastopol Times and said the art installation had mysteriously disappeared from the tree.
Jones had walked down the trail with some friends to show them the project. “And they were all gone,” Jones said. “Every single one of them.”
She said that when she wrote her proposal to the city, she had specifically asked that there not be any text or explanation with it.
“I just wanted it to look like a thing, and I think that might have been my mistake because somebody came and took them down,” she said. “I don’t know why they took them down.”
“It wasn’t about getting attention,” she said of her installation. “It was just my thing. Like I had had these pods that I worked a year on. I wove for, like, a year straight, and I just finished my thesis, and my thesis was those pods.”
There is a thing in the art world called “yarn bombing”—where fiber artists just put up random installations without permission. But that wasn’t what this was, Jones said.
“Some of my artist friends were, like, ‘Just do it!’ and I was, like, ‘No, because I want a relationship with the city, so I can go and work on temporary things in open spaces.’”
“I just assume somebody thought that I was just doing a guerilla act or something, and I wasn’t,” she said. “I had gone through all the right channels and gotten written permission.”
This is the point where I—your intrepid reporter—must admit that I fear I might have been responsible for the piece’s disappearance. Not because I took them, but because when I saw a picture of the yarn pods on Nextdoor, I had commented on the post that I’d read somewhere that yarn installations like these could sometimes be a danger to local songbirds.
I wasn’t exactly wrong. After they disappeared, I reached out to Veronica Bowers, the founder of Native Songbird Care & Conservation, and asked her opinion.
“The artist is obviously very talented—the knitted nests are beautiful, and I’m sorry I didn’t get to see them. Perhaps whoever removed them was concerned about the well-being of our local songbirds,” she said. “As beautiful as they are, yarn can pose a hazard to songbirds. Some species have tiny hooklets on their toenails which can become caught in fibers. We’ve cared for many birds over the years who have become entangled in yarn. For that reason, we discourage people from putting yarn out for birds during nesting season.”
But seriously, I did not mean to narc on a cool art project. I was not suggesting that anyone take them down. I told Jones about my comment on Nextdoor and offered to help her find her yarn pods, which were made of natural, reclaimed, raw-wool yarns.
The first thing I did was call the city of Sebastopol’s Public Works and Gold Ridge Fire. Since it was on city property, I thought it might have fallen victim to the massive clearing project the city and Gold Ridge did over the last two weeks.
Public Works, which gave Jones permission to put them up, said they hadn’t taken it, and so did Gold Ridge.
“I did not see anything like that when they were working,” said Gold Ridge Fire Chief Shepley Scroth-Carey. “We did not remove anything like that.”
Whoever took them down had their work cut out for them, Jones said.
“For some of those, I had to climb 20 feet in the air,” she said. “Whoever got them down had to work. Like, I had to work hard to get them up … I was sweating … There were 30 of them in the tree, or 40 of them. Who would pack all those out?”
Jones, who teaches art at Rancho Cotati High School, is mystified, but she’s also mourning the loss of her project.
“It is a symbol of a big growth period in my art life,” she said. “Just a big, huge jump in my art. I learned so much in graduate school, and that’s what it was.”
“It was really powerful,” she said, remembering how the piece looked in the tree. “I thought it was a really powerful thing, but I didn’t mean to upset anyone. You know, I certainly didn’t want to upset the naturalist community. That was not my intention at all. I wouldn’t have put them up if I thought they were in any way a harm to the birds or to any of that. But I feel like I must have made someone really upset.”
Jones is not feeling punitive about this situation. She would just like her artwork back or at least would like to know what happened to it. If you know, let her know at mjea@sonic.net.
Aww that makes me sad. I made a small fabric collage scene and it graced a trail in town for almost a year until someone decided to set it on fire. People are weird.