Spiritual Resistance: A Hay Sculpture by Deryk Houston

Deryk Houston, Artist. Aerial photo credit to Peter Holst.

Woodwyn Farms have been so wonderful in letting this work be done on their field. Now the weather has changed and the hay has been brought into the barn. This all makes for a nice happy ending.

I want to thank my wife Elizabeth, my daughter Amy, my son Samuel, and my friends, Sherry, Shelley, Stewart, Hamish, Jim, Carla, and Curtis who did a superb job of organizing everyone. I couldn't have done it without their help.

A few pictures of the making of this piece
Get involved - Deryk calls for people to follow his example and create their own art sculptures worldwide.

It has been a year since I sat with a very sick little boy in Baghdad. His mom and dad sat with him and watched him slowly die of leukemia. Anyone who has been in Iraq in the past ten years will understand the helplessness I felt. This boy is just one of the hundreds of thousands that our governments have shamelessly argued is worth the price.

As an artist, I have explored the sadness that settles deeper into my heart every year that economic sanctions are still in place. In Iraq, as some of you might know, I had found a large garden where I was able to complete a simple image of a child, using stones from the surrounding area.

I felt it might be a good idea to do these art images in different parts of the world and gain the opportunity to tell the story of the children of Iraq. I decided to look for a large hay field near my home. My idea was to cut the crop and position the golden hay into the image of a mother and child.

Two days of talking to many farms, and trying unsuccessfully to persuade them that an art project dedicated to the rights of the children of Iraq would be a wonderful project, I felt discouraged. As I drove around the farming community, I noticed a particular farm named Woodwynn Farm. The grounds and fields were immaculate and well maintained. I felt a little intimidated driving through the gate in myold Volvo and when I stepped out to greet the farmer's wife, she mentioned that the gate was supposed to be closed. I timidly gave her the information package describing my idea and drove away in a cloud of dust, wishing desperately to be less conspicous.

Shortly after I returned home, the phone rang and a man's gentle voice asked me to explain more about my "crazy idea" for a hay sculpture on his field. I poured my heart out. He told me that farming was a marginal business and trying to do anything with the hay would put the crop at risk. It had to be dried properly and baled at the right time or the value would drop. One hay field could easily have about five thousand dollars worth of hay on it. And then he said, "Come and pick out your field Deryk". I was thrilled.

We watched the hay grow and anxiously studied the weather. When the hay was cut and dried, my wife, Elizabeth and I laid out a grid pattern on the field using thin plastic tape in different colours and hundreds of wooden stakes. Friends came to help. We were all thrilled by the beauty of the valley and the scents surrounding us. It took a full day to lay out the grid pattern. Around seven that night, we were exausted from the heat and humidity.

I was starting to feel that I had taken on more than I could handle and that we were going to be beaten by time and weather. My thoughts turned to the little boy with leukemia and I continued laying out the sticks with flags that would help us move the hay into position the next day. By 8:00 p.m. the sun was getting low and on the warm breeze we could faintly hear people singing and praying. Against the backdrop of lengthening shadows, the sound drifted across the valley from a little white church nestled in a grove of nearby trees.

The next morning at six, we were on the field again. A few hours later we had completed the preparation work needed for the farmer to move the tons of hay with his tractor using the wooden stakes with coloured flags as his guide. The big tractor moved around the field in a delicate dance, shifting the hay into the long rows that formed the design.

At the end of the day we had a primitive, mysterious drawing of a Mother and Child formed from the cut and dried, golden hay.

Early the next morning as Elizabeth and I walked around the field and quietly surveyed our hard work, we were stopped in our tracks by something totally unexpected. In the silence of the moist hay and the sweet scent of wild roses growing alongside the field, we heard the unmistakable sound of a farm worker chanting an Islamic prayer.

We went home to hug our children.

After a year of only limited success in trying to tell my story to the media, the mother and child image I had created has worked like a Trojan horse. This project has reached into the hearts of the journalists and opened their eyes a little bit. Because of my field art project, I have been able to tell them about that little boy and the others like him.

So far, I have a long list of people from dozens of countries around the world who have said that they would love to do their own mother and child image. But this will only work if they carry through with their promise.