Freedom Baird is the vortex of her ideas. They are a constant flow of conceptual strings of consciousness. The manifestation of these ideas take form in the manner of the Magician in the Tarot deck; those which start as brilliant sparks in the mind’s eye manifest in varying installations and art pieces, crystallizing and forming as an act of communication.
At the Umbrella Center for the Arts in Concord, Massachusetts, curator Stephanie Marlin-Curiel is collaborating with educator Dr. Linda Booth Sweeney to present “Tapped In,” a pairing of eight scientists in the field of global warming, with eight artists. “The inspiration for this project,” Marlin-Curiel writes, “stems from a systemic understanding of climate change mitigation commonly expressed through the Bathtub metaphor. Originated by MIT Professor John Sterman and popularized by Al Gore through the Climate Reality Project and Bill Gates in his book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” the Bathtub has been used to model the complex dynamic of greenhouse gas pollutants (faucet outflow), atmospheric CO2 concentration (tub), and carbon sinks (drain) with the goal of making this basic understanding accessible to individuals of all ages…”
Baird’s work is always evolving into a deeper understanding of the mechanisms behind every act of community interaction, including global warming, and was asked to create a piece in response to the work of Daniella Malin, an agricultural scientist. Malin works to ensure sustainable farm practices, specifically keeping carbon in the soil, as a practical solution to farming ecology. Heading the Cool Farm Alliance, Malin works with agricultural conglomerates offering incentives to change their farming practices. Strip till farming, one implementation for ecological intelligence, saves money and reduces the carbon footprint. The “Cool Farm Tool” offers digital data that large scale farms can use to reveal how to adjust these practices.
Baird, in response, created a space where the visitor enters both physically and conceptually and works with the idea of incentive as part of the experience. She found a vintage cash register that had been used in an auto repair garage in Essex, Massachusetts for over 40 years. The artist sees the cash register as a beautiful object and intends to make it the center of her installation – it will be entitled “Till,” offering a triple meaning: working the soil with the intention of sustainability, the register’s storage of money and “till” meaning “until,” what Baird called, “The tipping point”. There will be metal coins stamped with “design of crops and a QR code.” The visitor takes a coin and is compelled to perform an act of soil carbon retention, document it and share it with the artist for social media purposes and receive payment incentive for these actions. Incentive in action is the parallel experience of the Cool Farm Alliance, in which the formal act on a large scale is reflected in the actions of the individual.