Selected Work from Don Sherefkin's Senior Tutorial and Reveries

Willing Field (Free Play) by Zofia Noble

Do you want to play? To climb and roll and jump and hide? I want to run so hard that I fall down in the grass and feel my pants getting cold and wet against my knees. I want to lay on my back and look up at the clouds until I’m seeing shapes. Play is purposeless and impulsive. Invigorating. Fun. Exploratory. Challenging. It can sneak up on you when you aren’t expecting it. What matters most is that it is not work: passive, forced, bound to exterior goals, or other-initiated.

Willing Field (Free Play) is a proposed playscape integrated into the familiar and permissive slopes of the Bennington College campus. It’s a place to be both apart from it and a part of it. It is whatever you need it to be. It’s a return to basic forms and feelings. Authenticity. Community. Gratification. The sky. The elements of Willing Field (Free Play) range from mountains to mounds, paths to pits. It is a structured site for unstructured use. The topography is ready and able to participate in your experience. It can easily guide you through, but it is also eager to be activated in spontaneous ways.

My practice is linked to this physical interpretation of play in that I feel most gratified when I’m working with my hands and on my feet. Dirt offers a haptic invitation that I just can’t resist. It reoccurs in my art as a material for modeling ideas. It connects me to the earth and grounds me as a body in place rather than a body in space. This sense is tied to the landscapes, foodscapes, and communities that I move within.

—Zofia Noble

Jiffy Cities, Patent Drawings by Jenna Litton

Everything that I make comes from a desire to be making, the process always outweighing the product. My process is printmaking. Without a printing press or shop I look to a process that feels as natural and satisfying as printmaking feels: something focused in time, repetition, and ephemerality. However unnamable it feels right now, this is the product. Jiffy Cities, Patent Drawings began with creating one model a day for one month. My drawings serve as documentation of the models, more than any photograph ever could. I can unfold them, rebuild them, patent them, and throw them away now. —Jenna Litton

A Writer's Retreat by James Mulligan

A small writer's retreat inspired by a Pablo Neruda Sonnet from his collection "Cien Sonetos de Amor."