Iris Ward Loughran
The following three bodies of work were made while I was a participant at Skowhegan school of Painting and Sculpture, where I did research on the 1724 massacre of Norridgewock. Now named Old Point, the land was originally home to an Indigenous village, and In 1694 father Sebastian Rasle, a French missionary, settled at there to establish a Jesuit Mission. After a few quarrels, there was a bounty on father Rasle’s scalp and in August of 1724 British colonists massacred the community of Norridgewock. There were survivors. They returned to bury their dead, but relocated to other parts of their land
The current land use of Old Point is split between private property and a cemetery, and is nestled between father rasle road and the Kennebec River.
These are a series of six photographs of signs guarding land along Father Rasle road, just outside Madison Maine.
At one end of Old Point is a view of the Kennebec river that is owned and maintained by an man with a fruit and vegetable stand. On his property has a barrier along the rivers edge and the road. On my second visit to the site, I approached him if I could use the post for an art project, and that I would put it back. He agreed.
I wanted the post to be returned having evidence of an unnatural occurrence. I wanted the memory of metal to show an unmistakably intentional wound.
In the cemetery there is a large 15 ft tall gated monument to Father Rasle, and an adjacent smaller monument that mentions Norridgewock. Leading up to the monument to Father Rasle, are rows and rows of headstones with European names. This gate was found discarded, leaning against the smaller monument.
To me this gate is a symbol of property and control of movement on stolen land. At first I wanted to minimize the gate through a crumpling gesture, then I thought about torturing the gate. I landed on scalping it. To scalp someone is used to have a piece of the body as a stand in for the whole thing, a sort of trophy. This object was also a sort of trophy to me.