Why theWABASHproject?

In 2019 I had a very potent dream. In this dream a friend gave me a beat up old storefront packed to the ceiling with broken furniture and bric-a-brac. After clearing it out, I created a refuge and a home; a space for creativity, meditation and for tending what needed tending. Visitors traded white stones for the things they needed. I awoke in the middle of the night and in half wakefulness named it theWABASHproject

The next morning I told my husband about the dream. And though I grew up in Indiana living and playing in the woods and the creeks on the Wabash river’s banks, when he read what Wikipedia had to say about the name, I was delightfully surprised.

“The name "Wabash" is an English spelling of the French name for the river, "Ouabache". French traders named the river after the Miami-Illinois word for the river, waapaahšiiki, meaning pure water over white stones.”

The white stones are referring to the place where the clear river water ran over bright expanses of limestone. We humans are like rivers, our “banks” or bodies always shifting and changing, but we are always moving, returning, flowing back to Mother Ocean.

This dream, the Wabash project, is the idea of flow and motion and allowing nature to take a greater part in our healing. This is happening not only in a small town in a tiny storefront in the front of our home on the Skagit River, but hopefully in all the hearts of those who visit and use it.

You, the visitor, participant, vendor, artist are the pure water flowing over our limestone sills.

WELCOME!

Come visit us at 512 South 1st Street, Mount Vernon, WA 98273

Open hours change seasonally. For current hours go to google maps or @thewabashproject on Instagram.

The Wabash Project is a gallery, shop and work space for creativity, healing and strengthening our connection with each other and with the Mother of us all, the Earth. We have rotating nature-based exhibits that shift every season. The shop includes up-cycled, hand-made, local, artisan-made objects and natural specimens that will hopefully pique your curiosity, elicit wonder, remind you of what it felt like to be a child in the magical out of doors. Come visit us in the lush Skagit Valley; native lands of the Upper Skagit Tribe. All are welcome!

HOMING: an ode to the birds - February thru May 2025

This show is an ode to the migrating birds we find in our valley during this season; Trumpeter and Tundra Swans, Snow Geese and others. These creatures have an innate ability to find their way home; to make safe passage and to create safe place every year they nest. They are our inspiration.

Relief and respite can be had in times of distress and suffering by orienting homeward; carving a path to peace in place and persons.  To nest, To build community. To find ways to protect our tender selves and those around us.

There is a strong leaning toward craft in the artwork of this show. Textiles, ceramics, wood; crafts typically associated with homemaking. This working with natural materials like wood, clay, wool creates a direct connection to the earth, which is the ultimate source of grounding and peace.    

Textiles by Rebecca Giordano and Christine Chaney. Assemblages by Marianna Madonna and Jeffrey Langlow. Ceramics by Deborah Renner, Katya Gudaeva and Hannah Fischer. Cutlery by Simon Gomez. Sculptures by Jennifer Fernandez.

CELESTIAL NAVIGATIONS - October -December 2024

A shift from the maritime aspects of sea and turn our eyes from the horizon to the sky with CELESTIAL NAVIGATIONS. Exploring the mystical heavens and divining a course by star and constellation; exhibiting art and ephemera, curios and specimens, videos and sound recordings.

sculpture and paintings by David Blakesley, ncaustics by Kyle Bjorklund, watercolors by Christine Chaney, jewelry by Simon Gomez, videos by John Schmitz

Show runs through December 2024

SEA: a maritime musing - June thru September 2024

The first time this rural mid-westerner stepped into the ocean I was in Fort Lauderdale, Florida for a high school jazz competition. The vast flat line drawn by a receding watery horizon was similar to the flatness of the corn fields I grew up in, but this was different and more mysterious. Swimming in something so vast and never ending was magical. I was hooked. I vowed to live on a coast somewhere sometime in my adult future.

During my architectural college studies at Indiana's Ball State University I lived in Chicago for a year during my required internship. I was often found lakeside, but knowing it ended in Canada somehow didn't scratch the itch, so upon graduation I was determined to hit an edge where the ocean took over. I remember being grilled by a professor who was desperately trying to figure out why I would move to the back water fishing hamlet of Seattle, WA. Why not New York or even Chicago? I pulled out a map and I said, "Do you see all that blue surrounding all that green? That's why." I wanted to be surrounded in every way, shape and form by water. The Ocean being the biggest draw.

Now married to a sailor and living part time on a remote non-ferry served island I am as close as I can be to the Salish Sea. I have mastered the art of swimming in it's frigid waters, because though I love being on and by the sea, I yearn desperately to be in it; salt water on my skin and in my mouth. Over the past 20 years my husband has brought and sent me gifts from sea and ship. Bones and baleen, decommissioned ship parts and videos from her deck; all included in this show along with sea-related artwork.

This exhibit is a love letter to the vast, awe-inspiring, resilient, ferocious, gorgeous, seductive, bountiful, resilient mother of us all; the SEA.

Work included by David C. Kane, Pieter VanZanden, Jane Kidder, Christine Chaney, Christopher Pompel and Scott Neilson

FIELD/WORK - April thru May 2024

As humans we have tilled and worked the soil for thousands of years and with farming came craft and with craft came art. In April 2024, we celebrated spring and our first Skagit Valley Tulip Festival with four Pacific Northwest female artists whose work illustrated the patterns, colors, textures we sow into our work and onto our lands. TheWABASHproject’s first curated event, FIELD/WORK was an exploration of the close connection of art to the tending of land.

Sheila Shanti (weaver) and Christine Chaney (conceptual designer)'s colorful hoop weavings, referenced the primitive wheel of time and change and the natural flow of plant growth throughout the earth's seasons.

​Christine Chaney's playful field installations referenced the evolution of getting to know a patch of Earth and the lessons to be learned for the tender.

Jane Kidder's textural and meditative paintings referenced the wilds of "un-handled" landscapes in contrast with the strict rows of "handled" fields.

Pamela Mills methodical watercolors were studies in the capturing of color in a landscape as well as referencing the rows and grids of organized crops in the fields.

Though the works were different in medium and methods they fed off each other in a very compelling way and the play between the four artists' work was vibrant and exactly what theWABASHproject's mission is: to bring artist's and objects together to create a conversation about our relationship with nature and the healing that can occur from our reconnection with it. Our first artist reception was well attended and an effervescent celebration of the artists, the art and the return of spring to our verdant valley.