ON PLOPPING AND OTHER OBSERVATIONS
By: Michael Rasmussen
DATE: June 13 2026, 10 AM
TEMP/WEATHER: 70s, Full sun
30 or so human folk of all ages congregated, spread across shade and sun, under the pine tree and between bunches of dried grass.
The first Test Plop exploration - a drawing workshop led by David Wilson with ambient musical accompaniment by Matt Nelson and Gil Sunshine. A communal gathering rooted in slowness and devotion to the details of our surroundings at Starr King. Throughout the workshop, each artist, or Plopper, was invited to use the landscape as both inspiration and medium, nudged towards different landscape scales, taught how to utilize natural and found materials to draw.
For the last several years, I have been blessed to work in the Sierra Nevada mountains and ancient coastal redwood forests of California, but I got my start tending to a prairie restoration project on the site of a former brick factory and brewery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Its own type of wilderness. Not too dissimilar from this charming city hillside Test Plot, however tiny and trying.
I am enamored by urban land care projects such as this. All of the preconceptions of wilderness, silence, solitude, and the sublime are cast aside and flipped on its head. An arson fire as inadvertent cultural burn, a vista of industrial shipping ports, chip bags, cigarettes, and bottles lining the nearby street. Proof of Life. Purple needle grass, california poppy, giggling children, adults coloring in the sun. Proof of Life.
Our morning of art, music, and conversation was an experiment in what reciprocal care looks like in this space. An experiment in imagination. New folks formed relationships and trust between their more-than-human-kin. I'd like to think we walked gently enough, even with a large group, and that dormant seeds enjoyed our music.
The Grass so little has to do
with only Butterflies to brood
and Bees to entertain
and stir all day to pretty Tunes
and hold the Sunshine in its lap
and bow to everything
The Grass so little has to do
I wish I were the Hay
THE GRASS - Emily Dickinson 1890
