About

INCUBATING CITIZENRY

The Ground Beneath Us seeks to create new models for teaching and beholding the world we live in. This is a citizenship of the living world. The heart of the program is visual storytelling. The combination of images and words is perhaps a person’s most persuasive and powerful tool. We host drawing and storytelling workshops, artists residencies and publish through GBU Books.

The Ground Beneath Us is a project sponsored by Charitable Partnership Fund

The Ground Beneath Us is available for itinerant programs to uncover the stories buried in your home soil. Contact us for more information.

BEHOLDING PLACE THROUGH IMAGE AND STORY

Making images and telling stories is an intimate way to behold a place. The stories we engage with are old ones: stories from immigrants and stories indigenous to a place. They are imaginings for a different future. We use simple materials, we read widely, we walk, we try to understand all the stories buried beneath our feet. Geology, oral history, political history, paleontology and tree time all frame the voices of the flora, fauna, all the human and non-human inhabitants. They are the storytellers. We do this through image making, comics, shadow puppets, clay objects and drawing. Practice and embodied learning root all of our programs.

The Ground Beneath Us began as a pedagogical experiment at Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2014 to create a model of embodied learning. In 2018 it was refashioned as an artist residency in the historic village of Waterford, Virginia. After the pandemic it went into another period of fermentation. Now The Ground Beneath Us is partnering with Building Five in Portland, Oregon to offer a series of lectures and workshop in 2024. Building Five is in the NW Marine Artworks studio complex, a former ironworks company that built large parts for marine projects such as Columbia River dams and Liberty Ships. The rich social and ecological history of the site is a perfect space for The Ground Beneath Us.

THE GROUND BENEATH US AT BUILDING FIVE

Building Five is a 5000 square foot installation and performance space in industrial NW Portland. Located in NW Marine Artwork, a complex of 60 plus artist studios. Building Five was established as an independent space in 2020 with the first installation in 2021.

Beginning in Autumn 2023, Ground Beneath Us and Building Five have teamed up for a series of conversations about place, storytelling and image making. For a full schedule of events, workshops and residencies go to www.buildingfive.org

GBU BOOKS

THE NAKED BOY GRAPHIC NOVEL BY DANIEL DUFORD

ISBN 978-1-304-44554-4, 266 Pages, $26

An adventure story, a mythic journey through North America, a fever dream of the United States: all of these describe The Naked Boy. The first three parts were published between 2009 and 2012. The final drawings were completed in 2014. The full volume has never been published. Now in 2024 the full volume is available.

From the introduction:

“The book has a couple of structures and guiding principles. The story structure is a combination of The Bear Mother, an Indigenous story present throughout North America. In the story, a young woman is seduced by a bear and then gives birth to twins. Her brothers come to kill the bear in spring but not before he imparts his wisdom onto the twins. The other story is that of Romulus and Remus, the brothers suckled by a she-wolf one of whom goes on to be the founder of Rome. I grafted the mythical onto the most simplistic version of Manifest Destiny as told in high school textbooks. Hence, the path the Naked Boy follows is the railroad track west. Added onto this cobbled together ghost train are folk songs, tall tales, myths of place and unexamined histories.”

Purchase directly at Lulu Publishers