Every night this summer, Dani Guo
went to sleep to the sound of crickets and the site of stars floating over a
field. The 27 year old is a seeker of a simple life. For five months she found it on a farm in Copetown.
Guo’s home
was in a cottage the size of a big garden shed. It had a sink, and some chairs,
a lamp, and a ladder to the sleeping loft .She cooked her meals in an outdoor
kitchen, and used the outhouse as needed. The carefree life, short on stuff but
big on experience was what the 27 year old wanted, “It was really nice not having clutter, I didn’t need to worry about having
so many things to clean and look after.”
On her path to a plain way of life, Guo was lucky to meet
the artist Dave Hind, and fortunate to find her way to ManoRun Organic Farm in
Copetown. Farm owner Chris Krucker and Hind had hatched an idea to create
Cottage Industrious. Hind would built a magical little cottage to house an
agricultural intern on the farm, three days a week the intern would plant, weed
and harvest, and the other three days they would make art. Guo, a Toronto
native saw an ad for the internship on goodwork.ca when she was working on a farm in Hawaii. “I couldn't believe someone combined art and farming, I
never thought such a thing existed.”
Guo was charmed by the 14’ by 10’ cottage Hind built. He’d
been making paintings out of recycled aluminum, and they kept getting bigger. “They started to resemble walls,” Hind says. So the idea of an art object made
functional led to Cottage Industrious. All parts of the cottage are recycled.
In addition to recycled aluminum Hind used windows and doors discarded from a
renovation, and bits and pieces of old lumber for interior walls and shelves.
The inspired floor is made of damaged highway signs from the 401. “I saw a broken sign and got the number for the company
that makes them, they were happy to see them reused.”
The exterior cottage walls are the artist’s canvas. One side is covered
by an aluminum painting of an igloo Hind made with The Aluminum Quilting
Society, an artist’s collective. The patchwork
pieces interpret a 1950’s Life Magazine photo of an
experimental igloo made of Styrofoam.
On the opposite side Guo drew and etched her experience of
farm life on bits of recycled aluminum. Each piece, about the size of a
baseball card, records the day-to-day work on the farm, from harvesting beets
to planting corn. It’s a
botanical journal for a new age.
Cottage Industrious is a concept for a different way of
living according to Hind, art meets agriculture meets simple shelter. It may
grow into a village. Already Hind’s portable, wood-fired sauna is parked next to the cottage,
next summer he may add a bathhouse. The cottage will be improved Hind says, but
not too much. “It’s about simple pleasures,
being outside, wood fires, feeling alive.”
Guo’s
internship finished in October. She’s packed her one bag and moved on to a monastery in
New Zealand where she will cook and garden in return for room and board. Though
she has a Masters in international relations, she found the work discouraging,
life on the land with less is her path. “Sleeping in the loft with the stars and the fireflies,
it made me fell like a kid again.”
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