Tucson makers Lisa Rooney and Lindee Zimmer are teaching and working with the community to build sustainable earthen structures.
Rooney is a farmer, educator and artist who works with a range of mediums like ceramics and architecture to create her artwork through natural materials.
Zimmer has been a multi-disciplinary artist for over 12 years, including painting large scale murals, and recently doing more earthen works through sculpture. She also has experience in art education.
Rooney and Zimmer first met each other in Denver. After leaving, they traveled to Spain and Portugal, learning more about making adobe bricks and earthen pigments, and ended up in Moracco. There, they stayed with a family and worked with children to build a dome playhouse for a preschool.
“That was just such an enlightening experience, I think, for both of us that got us really fired up and really excited to learn more about the work and put it into practice and the capacity to share it with others,” Rooney said.
They both went to Arizona to work with the Canelo Project, a non-profit organization that focuses on sustainability and using natural materials. They have lived in Tucson for three years now, doing various projects working with natural materials.
“We’ve done it in this capacity together for a while now but we’re also creating an educational setting through that avenue to make it a learning experience for community members,” Rooney said.
Through eight free hands-on workshops, community members of all ages collaborated to create a nine-foot birdhouse at the Tucson Village Farm. Participants learned how to make adobe bricks, stack earthen walls and apply plasters.
“The cool thing is these are sculptures, and so they are a little bit more creative than just a house, so there is a lot of ingenuity that comes into it, and that that portion is something that, we look forward to in all the future sculptures, that each one will be different.” Zimmer said.
After the success of the workshops with over 70 participants being signed up in the first 24 hours, Rooney and Zimmer are working with Tucson Village Farm and raising money to make an even bigger project and keep the workshops free and accessible to everyone.
“Our goal is to have about eight structures, kind of ranging in scale, like maybe three large scale sculptures, three medium and three small, or two medium and three smalls, just to have like a different size arrangement.” Rooney said.
A project called the Clayground is envisioned as a full-scale, community-built playground consisting of large interactive earthen play sculptures.
The project is not only intended to teach people about how to build and sculpt, but to also explore different perspectives on how materials are used.
“We could of course put a roof over this, and we could put lime on them, or we could even stucco them with concrete, but that's not the point of what we're trying to go for,” Zimmer said.
Rooney and Zimmer hope to raise enough money to fund the Clayground project with free workshops. The program is planned to open in Fall time and continue throughout the year. The playground will be located at the Tucson Village Farm and open to everyone to play and interact with once it is completed.
“It's very intensive, laborious work, and I think that there's just such an opportunity to connect with each other and problem solve in real time, and you know who isn't having a good time when they're playing in the mud and rolling around in the dirt,” Rooney said.
