FARMINGTON, ME (April 27, 2023)—The UMF Art Gallery is holding the annual Water Bear Confabulum on Saturday, April 29, 2023, from 11 a.m.-3 p.m. on the University of Maine at Farmington campus. The events are free and open to the public for children and adults of all ages.
This spring’s Water Bear Confabulum has two parts, indoor and outdoor. First, from 11 a.m.-3 p.m., participants will go on a Water Bear Safari (safari: Swahili, meaning to travel.) Come to the gallery at 246 Main Street, with moss, lichen, pond water, or moist leaves from your yard or find some on campus and we’ll put it under the microscope and project it so we can meet your tiny neighbors (water bears, rotifers, nematodes) traveling life’s journey alongside humans. We will document our discoveries in colorful artworks and build a mossy water bear habitat to take home.
Also from 11 a.m.-3 p.m., we will have a Maine Jellyfish Workshop where we’ll build our own jellyfish (or arctic char) to participate in the Happening: “Ice Age Now” or just to take home.
At 3 p.m., there will be a jellyfish parade over to the front of the Emery Community Arts Center to meet everyone participating in Ice Age Now, a happening written by Libra Professor mp Warming and Sarah Maline, reenacting Maine’s last ice age. Become a glacier, a calved iceberg, an erratic or a marine animal! Wear a color or costume to express your ice-age identity; percussion instruments welcome. If you don’t wear a costume, we’ll have props available.
mp Warming
The Water Bear Confabulum is an annual or biannual alternative arts festival and series of events in Farmington, Maine, that celebrate diverse artistic and community voices. The gathering invites reimagining of everyday places in surprising ways through art and performance. By subverting traditional expectations of familiar places through the arts and by artistically invading overlooked and unconventional spaces, artmakers bring fresh attention to the fabric of Farmington and to our local conversation with global ideas.
Water bear image by scientific photographer Sinclair Stammers
The water bear (or tardigrade) is a unique and enduring animal living unseen among us, adapting to new environments even to the extremity of outer space. A confabulum conflates the meanings of confabulation: first, to simply engage in conversation, and second–the psychological meaning–the mind’s compulsion to generate fictions to fill gaps in memory.
The Water Bear Confabulum is made possible by the Libra Professorship Program which brings scholars of national and international prominence to University of Maine System campuses to provides students and community with outstanding models of teaching, research, and public service. It is co-sponsored by the Divisions of the Arts and Natural Sciences.
Please contact Sarah Maline, associate professor of art history and UMF Art Gallery director, at maline@maine.edu or 778-1062 for more information.
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EDITOR’S NOTE:
Image: https://www.umf.maine.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/1/2023/04/RP223-054A.jpg
Photo Caption: mp Warming
Photo Credit: Submitted Photo
Image: https://www.umf.maine.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/1/2023/04/RP223-054B.jpg
Photo Caption: Water bear image by scientific photographer Sinclair Stammers