Artists' Open House Weekend-Studio Tours in Susquehanna County PA

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Ken Ely is a native of Susquehanna County who has been involved in stone-wall building and restoration since his teenage years. His other interests include cooking, backpacking, and travel. He is a member of Woodbourne Forest Preserve Stewardship Committee, The Sierra Club, and Keystone Trails Association. Ken began rebuilding fallen stone walls at Woodbourne Orchards in Dimock, PA, for the Cope family. The walls at Woodbourne revealed to Ken their structure and the skills of their builders.

While he builds mostly utilitarian structures, Ken finds a certain artfulness in fitting stones of varying sizes and shapes together to form a functional, orderly whole, not unlike Baroque music. Key to the many rewards of wall-building are the benefits of physical exertion, the satisfaction of viewing a tangible result of one's work, and the earthy, subtle coloring of the region's sedimentary rock, its mosses, and its lichens. It's also important to Ken that he creates these structures in much the same way that our predecessors did, using simple human-powered tools.

Ken founded Good Neighbor Walls in 1996, and has completed projects in Susquehanna, Wyoming, Luzerne, Bradford, and Broome (NY) counties. Beyond restoring old and building new walls, he presents slide programs about local walls and conducts wall-building workshops. Ken received a fellowship grant in 2009 from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and has been selected as a 2010 and 2011 Commonwealth Speaker by the Pennsylvania Humanities Council. Additionally, his work will be featured at various locations in the state in 2010 and 2011 with the "Making it Better" tour, a traveling exhibition of Folk Arts in Pennsylvania Today.

This year Ken will be demonstrating on his own property, for the first time, in Dimock Township. The project is a new retaining wall along the edge of the driveway. Stop by to talk about your projects or to discuss general techniques or history. Please be aware that the map symbol in this year's Studio Tour map is incorrectly placed, although the text is accurate in terms of directions. The site is located 2.2 miles southeast of Dimock on S.R. 3023, the road that runs from Dimock to Nicholson. To find it, proceed to Dimock on S.R. 29 (about 6 miles south of Montrose). In Dimock, turn onto S.R. 3023 directly across from Baker's Garage. The site is 2.2 miles from Route 29, on the left. Watch for the pink arrows. You can contact Ken by phone at (570) 289-4783 or by email at stonewaller@frontiernet.net.

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