Dolmen Project (Year Twelve) Confessions of a “Guerilla Artist”: Social Isolation

Wade and Tripod 2015

Day 1 (3/21/20)

Where to start? In the last week our world has been turned on end. Social isolation has become the order of the day. Schools have gone online and everywhere there is a surreal, nagging uncertainty. The COVID-19 virus which was just identified four months ago has swept across the planet and changed life as we know it. I have decided to spend some of my isolation time going back and visiting some builds that I have made along the bike trail over the last twelve years. When I first started the Dolmen Project it was an attempt to exercise both my body and mind. I would ride out every morning and build structures along the bike trail and come home and blog about it. At first they were basic cairns of different sizes. We had seen them in Iceland and Norway and found them fascinating. I had the goal of building a hundred of them along the trail. It didn’t take long to realize this wasn’t going to happen since soon after building them they would get knocked down by either natural or human causes. After awhile I started expanding my repertoire to include other objects left lying around by the railroad. I started doing larger and more elaborate builds. Eventually my manifesto became that I could not use anything that was not found on the trail and that would not eventually return to its past state. The first couple of years there was a lot of material available. The railroad had left ties and hardware everywhere which provided a good base to work with. Then later they must have decided that they had value and came through and grabbed everything even the ones that were sculptures. After that I had to get more creative and do more foraging. The first couple years I also made sure I wasn’t caught building. I would go out early so that by the time it got busy I was home blogging and a new crop would seem to pop up overnight. These first couple blogs will go back and take a look at some of the different years and some of the challenges that presented themselves over the last eleven years.