We field a lot of questions about where the idea of opening up the landscape here on the farm came from. There are a lot of words below that tell a version of the story, but in the simplest of terms, the PN Farm Arts Initiative exists to explore how the arts can add to the conversation around wild spaces and working spaces, and how those spaces interact and coexist in the face of rapid development and human growth in this region. It also exists simply to share the joy, beauty and power of the arts, and of the land.
But how did we get here, and why?
The landscape of Plas Newydd Farm is on the brink of change. The shape of the land here at the confluence of the Lewis and Columbia Rivers has always been changing, whether through the dynamics of plate tectonics, glaciation, or the annual fluctuations of the rivers, or at the hands of humans. The landscape has been stewarded for generations, first by indigenous peoples including the Chinook and Cowlitz tribes, and later by homesteaders Columbia and Rosannah Lancaster, who settled here in the 1850’s. The property was purchased by Constance and Aubrey Morgan in 1941, and has been cared for by the Morgan family ever since. The land is currently managed as a mixed-use farm, home to beef and small-scale timber operations.
And now, the Wapato Valley Mitigation and Conversation Bank, managed by David Morgan, a grandson of Constance and Aubrey (and this writer’s husband), is poised to “re-wild” the landscape, returning hundreds of acres of low-lying pasture and forestland to wetlands and endangered species habitat. While the conservation program staff worked diligently over the past decade to collect mountains of data on the plants, animals, geology, geography, geomorphology of this piece of land, I have been stunned by the richness of what they have produced. This landscape is deeply known, at the scientific level.
The PN Farm Arts Initiative was first conceived in 2019, with the intention of capturing the “before” picture of this landscape through an artistic lens, to complement the scientific data with an aesthetic data set— to share the stories of this place through the eyes of artists. There was a little global disturbance in 2020 that shifted our flow, and we launched in 2023 with a series of workshops in the historic farmhouse on the property, and later out on the land itself. We continue to grow and evolve as new ideas emerge, but our core mission remains this work of collective story-telling and community-building.
The Arts Initiative is a project that will move through time. Even as we have been working over the past three years to capture this moment before restoration, we are also looking backwards, diving into the histories of this place, learning who has been here before us, what has shaped the landscape, and how we came to be here now. As we capture the transition from agriculture to a wilder landscape, it’s vital to acknowledge the endangerment of agricultural land here in Clark County, and to honor the farming legacy of this piece of property and the work that has gone into ensuring that this land is still intact and available to become a conservation bank. Without years of careful stewardship, we would not be where we are now with this project. Because of the nature and size of this farm, farming will be able to continue on the property in acreage not within the conservation bank. This gives us a unique opportunity to look at how wild spaces and working spaces can interact and coexist in this time of incredible development and human growth in the region.
Ideally the PN Farm Arts Initiative will allow us to, keep coming back as the re-construction of wetlands and oak and salmon habitat is initiated and, ultimately, completed. We have a unique opportunity to capture the before and after (not to mention during) of changes on the landscape here, and we are privileged to be able to invite other artists in to help interpret the complexities of this moment. By engaging with a multitude of art forms, from writing to painting to sculpture to music, together we will bring many voices together for this conversation.
In the years between the first vision for the Arts Initiative and today, we have also tapped into the power of our local creative community. There is a host of artistic talent here in Clark County, and a real hunger to come together around a table to be in conversation with other artists of all kinds. This creative community is one of the absolute joys of this work, and something we will continue to lean into in the coming years, with workshops, crafting events, community gatherings, artist residencies and more.