Farm helps SKYHope women connect to the joy of art

Jul. 20—Creating art can be a healing experience for anyone, but finding the opportunity to create while going through recovery for drug addiction can be difficult. That's why a program giving the women of SKYHope Recovery Center a place to express their creativity is so important, according to those who are a part of it.

The Recovering Joy Arts and Nature Center recently was awarded a grant for $8,050 from the Kentucky Foundation for Women to help fund classes that teach SKYHope women more about fiber arts — using fibers from plants and animals to create yarn that can be then used in weaving projects.

According to Recovering Joy's director, Brenda Richardson, those classes will include teaching the women how to dye wool using indigo.

Three artists are involved in this particular grant, she said. Sarah Broomfield from Berea is the indigo dyeing expert.

Jessica Madison, of Annville, will teach weaving. "She has a good grasp on beginning weaving and how to teach it because she has taught it to her homeschooled children, who can also teach it," Richardson said.

And Britney Luttrell, who is from Somerset, is a fiber artist and will be teaching felting, or the act of working fibers together to make a piece of fabric.

The project will be very hands on for the SKYHope women, according to Richardson.

"We've got some lamb's wool that was grown on this farm that will be dyed with indigo," she said. "We have some alpaca that was gifted to us in browns and beige, and they'll have some black lamb's wool from here, so they'll be able to combine colors and make wall hangings."

The dyeing/weaving grant isn't the only one the nature center has received recently, she said. This grant will tie into on they received from the Kentucky Colonels, a $2,500 grant that allowed them to purchase portable looms that the women can take back and forth from the recovery center.

Nor are fiber arts the only education found at the center's farm, located in the White Lily area.

The women from SKYHope come out to the farm every couple of weeks, explained Rhonda Campbell, a resident who helps with the recovery center's art classes.

The women get to help with the high tunnel-style greenhouse on site, in which they assist in the growing of Calla lilies and food. That helps to teach the women how food relates to good health, Richardson said.

Campbell also talked about the stargazing nights held at the farm, or the day where blankets were spread out on the ground and the women could eat strawberries and just nap in the yard.

"It's just a place to come relax and be yourself. It's like being at grandma's place. ... It's a little sense of home," Campbell said.

"What I want to have here is for people suffering addiction to have a safe place to create and to be who they are beyond and underneath and beside whatever disease they suffer," Richardson added.

Art — and the relaxation that can be found on the farm — helps the women reconnect with themselves or discover something about themselves that may be difficult to find within the recovery process.

As SKYHope Program Director Melissa Estep explained, "[The women] are making wind chimes, they're making painted art, and ceramic jewelry. She's teaching all these therapeutic things that actually come to life, and they absolutely love it. It's so refreshing to be at the farm and to connect with the earth and nature, to see things in a different perspective. ... Having the ladies up there connecting with [Richardson], it's kind of a transactional healing peace for everybody."

Campbell said, "In the early stage of getting sober, my artwork was the only thing that helped me hang on day-to-day."

She contrasted it to the Big Book Bootcamp-like program the women go through during recovery, a bootcamp that is part of the 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous program.

"We do classes 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Also the house is self-sufficient. We all have jobs, even during recovery hours, until 10 o'clock at night. ... With recovery, you get to reconnect with yourself. There's a lot of girls who have so much talent, and in recovery you lose that. As you're working on your recovery, that's also a huge part of it — finding your sense of purpose, finding yourself again. And the arts does amazing things for that."

One of the classes taught by people associated with the Recovering Joy Arts and Nature Center is Jonathan Clark's clay crafting, which uses a very special type of clay.

Clark said he found the clay through Richardson and a person named Patrick Angel. Angel said he knew of some veins of white clay that run through former coal mining areas in eastern Kentucky, eastern Tennessee and West Virginia.

When coal is removed through strip-mining, there are also materials that are brought up with the coal that need to be separated out. Whatever is left is called "spoil," and that can include the clay, Clark and Richardson explained.

Without knowing if it was a good material to work with, Angel brought Clark around 15 buckets of the white clay for Clark to experiment with.

Clark said he found it to be a "very flakey clay" which needed to be refined and cleaned up before it could be used in crafting.

However, once he started experimenting with it, he found out just how well it suited the purpose of being used to make items like tiles, pottery and jewelry.

Most Kentucky clays, he said, are not fit to be used in crafting, in that they are dark in color and tend to stay dark brown when fired. They also have a low firing temperature and can't take the heat of a kiln.

This "spoil" clay, however, stays light in color when fired. It also takes the heat while being fired in a kiln better as well.

"This is the highest-fired clay I think anyone's ever found in Kentucky. It's really close to porcelain, which is unheard of in this area," he said.

The clay was perfect for taking into places where people are recovering and letting them make things with it.

"This just fit into the story of reclaiming and recovering those things that have been lost or forgotten or unused," he said. "It's become a really cool tool."

As for the items, artworks and crafts the women create through the program, many of those will be donated to be auctioned off at SKYHope's October fundraiser, Campbell said.

The fundraiser is held every year and is a way for the women to give back to the recovery center.

Campbell said she submitted some of her work last year, and said the art went for pretty good prices.

The proceeds go back into the home, helping to fund things like outings for the women, trips to places like the movie theater, and to fund programs such as the one that helps the women retrieve identification such as drivers licenses and birth certificates.

Carla Slavey can be reached at cslavey@somerset-kentucky.com