The radiant season

The smallest bone in your body is located deep within your ear and is called the oval window. Peer through it and you will discover the inner ear’s labyrinth, where balance lives and sound moves toward your brain where it can be deciphered. 

The oval window project is a durational embodied listening project that supports individuals and communities in experiencing their inner and outer landscapes over time. The project takes the outer appearance of a community-constructed seven-circuit stone labyrinth located in Stonington, Connecticut at Maple Lawn Farm, the colonial homestead of the Wheeler Family. The Oval Window Project hosts activations in the form of community gatherings during times of solstice, equinox, and other celestial moments. The project exists invisibly in moments of spaciousness and creative potential. Moments when a person sits - suspended in a synapse - before information is transferred from one place to the next.

Some term this kind of built space "land-based art". Others term it "social practice art". Some engage in a practice of refraining from naming things at all. The Oval Window Project can be a place for that, too. 

Connect to Create partners with Maple Lawn Farm for retreats, classes, and gatherings to inspire deep connection with nature and creativity. 

Participate in the Oval Window Project by attending a public event or by requesting a private visit info@ConnectToCreate (dot) net.

The land where the Maple Lawn Farm labyrinth stands is the ancestral home of the Pequot people. For twenty-five years, a dedicated group of farmers, artists, and community members came together to listen to this land—clearing fields, researching its history, and gathering its stones.

In the summer of 2022, this collective effort culminated in the creation of a 7-circuit labyrinth. The design honors the Haudenosaunee philosophy of Seven Generations: a commitment to ensuring a sustainable world for seven generations into the future, deeply anchoring the interconnectedness of our past, present, and future.

Many of the stones that form the labyrinth’s path were gathered from the stone walls delineating the farm’s fields. As community members moved them, they found themselves wondering whose hands had first placed them:

• Was it during the colonial period, by the enslaved, indentured, or hired hands of the past?
• Or did they predate European arrival, placed by the Pequot people who skillfully utilized controlled fire to manage the forests and nurture the ecosystem?

Research revealed a complex truth: while some who labored on this land did so by choice, many others did so under the weight of enslavement or forced indenture.

By the late 1700s, Stonington and New London were the largest slave-holding towns in Connecticut—the last New England state to abolish slavery in 1848.

In the late 1600s, enslaved individuals were brought to the farm, their original names stripped away by the colonial system. In historical records, they are remembered only by the names given to them by colonizers: Quash, Juno, Cab, Caesar, Scipio, Hagar, Flora, Chloe, Phyllis, and Pharaoh. We speak these names today to honor their presence and the lives they lived.

Later, from the early 1800s through the 1950s, a nearby poorhouse saw children and community members taken in by the Wheeler family to exchange household and farm labor for shelter. Among these individuals were Clarabelle Robinson, Mary (a Pequot girl), and Gladys Sebastian Hazard (a member of the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation).

The Labyrinth at Maple Lawn stands as a living monument to all of these stewards—both named and nameless—who shaped this land before us.