About Us
The Oval Window Project
The smallest bone in your body is located deep within your ear and is referred to as the oval window. Peer through it and you will discover the inner ear’s labyrinth, where balance lives and through which 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 to experience 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.
Connect to Create partners with Maple Lawn Farm and the Oval Window Project for retreats and gatherings to inspire deep connection with nature and creativity.
Participate in the Oval Window Project by requesting a visit to the Labyrinth info@ConnectToCreate.net.
Listening to the Land
The land where the labyrinth stands is the ancestral home of the Pequot people. For the last 25 years, the farmers at Maple Lawn, a group of artists, and community members, cleared fields and collected stones. In the summer of 2022, stones were placed in the shape of a 7-circuit labyrinth. Through a process of listening to the land and researching its history, the community of builders sought to honor the many stewards who attended the land.
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.
Honoring the Stewards of the Land
Research revealed that while some of the stewards labored by choice, others did so as the result of enslavement or indenture. Quash, Juno, Cab, Caesar, Scipio, Hagar, Flora, Chloe, Phyllis, Pharaoh were the names given to some of the enslaved people who were brought to the Wheeler farm in the late 1600s. In the late 1700s, New London and Stonington were the largest slave holding towns in the state and in 1848 Connecticut was the last New England state to abolish slavery. A poor house, built near the farm in the early 1800s, remained until the 1950s and the Wheeler family took in children from this “house” as well as from the community. In exchange, those individuals tended to the household and land. Among the indentured was Mary, a Pequot girl, and Gladys Sebastian Hazard, a member of the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation.
Many of the collected stones that comprise the labyrinth were found in piles along the perimeter of the old walls that delineate the fields on the farm. As the community uncovered these stones, they had good reason to imagine they were initially cleared by the enslaved, indentured, and hired hands of the past. Now these stones, carried to the grove and thoughtfully placed, reconfigured to outline the labyrinth’s path.