A Place Called Home:
The Ebenezer Keyes Conservation Project
Work by Jessica Robey
North County Land Trust
Artist-in-Residence 2023-2024
On Display in the Upper Gallery Through June 30, 2025
Artist Reception June 14, 2025 at 6:30pm
Artist Statement
The Ebenezer Keyes Conservation Area is a site where multiple arguments about our place within nature come into focus, collide and tussle. My role as the North County Land Trust Artist-in-Residence has not just been to document the site in its transition, but rather to explore the transition in thinking about such hybrid sites, from the colonial era to the present. The plans that NCLT has developed for this place seek to shift our thinking from the narrative of a fall from grace, to one of renewal, resilience and sustainability. NCLT envisions a mixed-use area that will serve as a recreation site for an underserved community, and a restored and managed Sandplain Grassland habitat crucial to maintaining biodiversity in New England. These types of managed interactions that benefit both the human and nonhuman community are key to creating a more sustainable and ethical future for our planet.
My work for this project is primarily photographic, combined with acrylic paint and pastels, and collaged with pages from antique bibles, celestial navigation charts, vintage prefab home catalogs, and the planning report for Keyes. I include excerpts from the writings of the nineteenth-century naturalist Wilson Flagg and contemporary environmental historian William Cronon as signposts tracking how our understanding of the local environment has changed over the centuries, and how this history shapes our experience of the land. My artwork is where I negotiate my own ambivalent feelings toward places like Keyes. Will our human nature ever allow us to feel truly at home in our natural habitat? I have no answer to this, but I believe it is crucial for our survival to dedicate ourselves to grappling with the question.
Jessica Robey, NCLT Artist-in-Residence 2023-2024
Introduction
In 2021, North County Land Trust inaugurated our Artist-in-Residence program in order to expand our opportunities to engage and educate the public about the natural world and its wonders. We believe our collaborations with local artists complement and enhance NCLT’s mission to broaden our reach and inspire conversations around our conservation work. Jessica Robey (Fitchburg, MA), our second artist in residence, focuses here on our recent acquisition of the Ebenezer Keyes Conservation Area.
In December 2020, NCLT accepted a donation of 157 acres of land on the west side of Parker Pond in Gardner, MA. After major site preparation work for a 100+ house subdivision in 2004, the project was abandoned. The land lay disturbed and fallow, until we accepted the donation 16 years later. Through our Stewardship planning work, we found a naturally emerging inland Sandplain Grassland habitat on the worst of the disturbed sandy area. A regionally and globally rare habitat, NCLT is working to nurture this habitat for the prairie warbler, tiger beetle, and other species dependent upon this imperiled habitat. Having a diversity of habitats in our region is important as future long-term weather patterns and changes to our climate are uncertain.
We hope that Jessica Robey’s work, which explores the intersection of the constructed and the natural at Ebenezer Keyes Conservation Area, will help us tell the story of this unique site and NCLT’s efforts to enhance it. We are grateful to Freedom's Way National Heritage Area for their support for this project.
Anna Wilkins, NCLT Director of Conservation and Climate (Executive Director 2017-2024)
Please visit www.northcountylandtrust.org for more information about the work of NCLT and how to join us. Our critical work is made possible by generous donations from caring individuals and entities.
