In Fragments

From 2015–2021, High Acres Farm was the site of 21 rituals performed by artist and technologist Jonathan Harris as a way of working with the energies of his ancestral family land — alchemizing old family patterns into fertile soil for positive futures.

The ritual work included a manual glassmaking process using locally gathered ingredients mixed with the cremated remains of his mother, fired together in a hillside furnace at the southern edge of the property. Other tangible outcomes included the 2017 gut renovation of the historic Main House, the 2020 completion of Notitia Sanctuary, and the 2021 installation of Electric Webb — a network of 27 “lightning transformers” creating a new “energy grid” for the land.

The rituals (collectively titled In Fragments) are documented through a series of films that premiered at High Acres Farm on the Fall Equinox of 2021 for an audience of family members and friends.

In Fragments offers an example of “Life Art” — art that works with an actual life situation, incorporating tools, materials, people, places, and dilemmas that exist in the chosen frame of experience — rewarding the practitioner with the chance to live inside the growing work.

The 21 rituals that make up In Fragments are:

1. The Joyous, Lake — A ritual to witness the many changing moods of a primordial body of water
2. Linestone — A ritual to align the white veins in a collection of ancient gray stones
3. Urim and Thummim — A ritual to utilize a set of gray and white “seeing stones”
4. Not a Single Point — A ritual to pulverize a collection of gray and white stones into powder
5. Process of Elimination — A ritual to examine the particles in a pile of pulverized powder
6. Individuation — A ritual to connect with a group of mentors and friends
7. Equidistant — A ritual to collapse related phenomena into a single plane of perception
8. Scarecrow — A ritual to rectify patterns of fear using an effigy dressed as my mother
9. Space Suit — A ritual to witness the cremation of my mother
10. Make Me a Vessel — A ritual to craft a funeral urn for the cremated remains of my mother.
11. Apprenticeship — A ritual to source and prepare the ingredients to make local glass from scratch
12. Phase Change — A ritual to make glass using the cremated remains of my mother
13. Use a Hammer — A ritual to shatter and burn the reflections of nine outdated identities
14. Hall of Mirrors — A ritual to arrange a set of broken fired mirrors into a rectangular mosaic
15. Give Up the Ghost — A ritual to banish the spectre of my grandfather’s alcoholism
16. Paper Weight — A ritual to clear the burden of my mother’s fearful dreams
17. Hexagram — A ritual to disperse the limitations of a pernicious land use agreement
18. A Witness to Life — A ritual to honor the closing of a digital storytelling community
19. See Glass — A ritual to honor the primordial lake with a collection of broken fired mirrors
20. Electric Webb — A ritual to install a new “energy grid” using a network of “lightning transformers”
21. In Fragments — A ritual to conjure a creation myth using lake water and “linestones”

You can view the 21 films (and learn more about the project) by exploring infragments.us.

Download information booklet about In Fragments (20 MB)

Electric Webb

The closing ritual of In Fragments was Electric Webb — which involved the design, fabrication, and installation of a network of 27 custom-made “Lightning Transformers,” planted at precise longitude and latitude coordinates across forty acres of land, encompassing much of High Acres Farm in a 27-pointed star-shaped geometry reminiscent of the early American quilts that Electra Havemeyer Webb (who established the estate in 1948) used to collect (shown above).

Each of the 27 Lightning Transformers contains a glass mirror, laser-engraved with a single word along with a map of the overall network with a single vertex circled — indicating that Transformer’s location relative to its neighbors. A bare copper wire encircles each mirror, connecting to a bare copper point facing skyward, then running down along a powder-coated steel post, traveling several feet into the ground, where various special objects are buried.

The Transformers can be used in a few different ways:

• As Self-Reflectors — by approaching a Transformer and looking into its mirror, you can see yourself immersed in the landscape of High Acres Farm, overlaid with a particular concept: giving you the opportunity to contemplate how that specific quality shows up in your life, and what it means to you.
• As Tuning Points — by removing your shoes and socks so that your bare feet are touching the ground, and then gripping a Transformer’s copper point with your hand, your body completes an electrical circuit that circles the mirror and passes into the soil. In this way, you can “tune your frequency” to the specific intention shown on each mirror, giving and receiving with the living earth.
• As a Mandala — by attracting lightning strikes in summer storms, the Transformers mix the raw electricity of nature with the human intentions engraved on the mirrors, performing a kind of “Earth Acupuncture” as the energy enters the ground. Through this distributed “power grid,” we can supercharge the land with our intentions — as an “energetic quilt” woven into the landscape, holding our prayers for the future.

We invite our guests to explore and interact with the network of 27 Lightning Transformers as a way of adding their own personal energy to High Acres Farm — now a fertile farm for dreams.

You can learn more at infragments.us/electric-webb.

Download information sheet about Electric Webb (3 MB)

Linestone

Linestone is an evolving experiment in connection, creativity, and learning. We seek to bring new forms of beauty into existence by finding the natural alignments between people, places, projects, and dreams. We host invitation-only gatherings of leading practitioners across a wide range of disciplines, creating the conditions for radical collaboration towards positive futures — much in the way that investing in healthy soil is a prerequisite for growing healthier plants.

The ancient gray and white stones from which we take our name were formed by geologic forces over millions of years. Their iconic white veins are the remnants of the bodies of sea creatures who used to live in the shallow tropical waters that once covered the land that we now call Vermont. The calcium bodies (shells, corals, etc.) of those ancient beings reach us today as reminders of a time when the lines of each stone used to connect — pointing to a long-forgotten wholeness that‘s still within reach, awaiting a process of realization.

You can contact Linestone at .