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Nestled among the trees between Old Highway 99 and Interstate 5, near the border between Whatcom and Skagit counties, you’ll find the Lookout Arts Quarry. There, on roughly 60 acres of property, is a land restoration project doubling as a festival site and campground.Mount Baker Theatre

The former quarry is home to the annual Bellingham Arts and Music Festival (BAMF), Sh’Bang and other artistic events, drawing hundreds of people over the course of a few days. But for a select group of artists, this unique place is also their full-time home, providing them a collaborative and communal living environment unlike any they’ve experienced before.

The Lookout Arts Quarry, about a 15-minute drive out of Bellingham, is host to several performance art festivals. Photo credit: Matt Benoit.

The property has been in the hands of Ilando (I-Lando) Sparks and a rotating cast of shareholders, many of whom are also residents, over the last decade. Stepping onto the property, which is considered private except during public events, is to be transported to a world of calm and beautiful simplicity.

A Home in the Woods

The Lookout Arts Quarry is about one-third public event space, one-third active wetlands and one-third residential living area. At any given time, up to 18 people live here most or all of the year, with artists coming and going during the summer performance season. Other more temporary residents legally camp from May through October.

The full-time residents live mostly in uniquely-crafted tiny homes with a communal kitchen, library yurt, garden and swimming area that used to be a rock quarry. Pretty much anything you see on the property has been built by residents, for residents.

Sam Top is an installation artist and quarry resident who’s latest project is an outdoor shrine to the dead. Photo credit: Matt Benoit.

Camellia Nieh is one of those residents. The 41-year-old dance and movement artist first visited here two years ago, and for the past year, she’s called it home. A former Portland resident, Nieh spent much of the previous four years traveling aboard, including stints in Israel and aboard a ship circling the globe.

“This is the kind of place where someone who’s an artist and an adventurer can have a home base and a community,” she says. “This place checks all the boxes for what my priorities were in a home to share with my son: sustainability, non-violent communication; value placed on art and creativity and community and less on consumption.”

Residents of the quarry go through an application process and, once approved, gain full access to communal areas like the kitchen, a place that dictates the number of potential residents based upon food storage space. Different rent rates are available, and community service hours can net residents discounts. Becoming a shareholder of the land is also a process. If other shareholders approve, a new shareholder can purchase shares from a finite allotment. Shareholders can also sell their shares to other shareholders.

Back to the Garden

Lavender and other herbs hang from the ceiling inside a tiny home at the Lookout Arts Quarry. Photo credit: Matt Benoit.

Inside one of the tiny homes, it smells like a cup of tea. Mint, lavender and other garden herbs dangle from the ceiling, drying so they can be used for homemade teas and elixirs. This is the home of 29-year-old Morgan “MoMo” Brown and her three-year-old daughter Iris. The door to Iris’ room is shaped like a giant leaf.

Brown has lived here for just over two years. When she’s not engaging in shadow puppetry, she spends her time gardening, cooking and wildcrafting. She’ll turn cattail starch into shortbread cookies, and various plants into homemade medicines.

“There are a lot of actively-inspired and motivated people here,” she says of the quarry. Her daughter gets to be around those people, she adds, and that’s a great thing, especially since many of her daughters’ friends are chickens. “I think children flourish when they’re surrounded by many people who can offer them different things,” she says.

Brown plays a huge role in managing the property’s sustainable practices and permaculture, and that includes a truly impressive garden. A brief waltz through the grounds finds chestnut, cherry and apple trees, and inside the greenhouse are 22 tomato plants and dozens of sunflowers. The garden has seasonal squash, melons, cucumbers, kale, raspberries, blue elderberries and edible flowers, many of which are supplied to Dandelion Organics, a local produce delivery business.

Brown says they’ve also planted native species along the wetlands, which are home to beavers, blue herons, snakes, frogs and ducks, among other creatures.

A Diverse Array

Arrington de Dionyso lays on his stomach in front of a 40-foot scroll of white paper. De Dionyso is one of the quarry’s rotating artists-in-residence, who stay at the quarry while completing a specific project. Photo credit: Matt Benoit.

Inside a rounded yurt that acts as a library, music room and place of artistic contemplation, Arrington de Dionyso lays on his stomach in front of a 40-foot scroll of white paper. Not far away, a saxophone case lies open on the floor.

The 43-year-old Olympia-based musician and painter is the latest artist-in-residence at the quarry. Currently, he’s working on a stop motion animation project that will produce a 10-minute video and a finished scroll drawing. He’ll exhibit both pieces here and in Bellingham, before continuing his travels.

“It’s stunningly beautiful,” he says of getting to live here for a month. “I’ve travelled all over the world, and I don’t have anything that immediately comes to mind to compare to this place.”

Cullen Beckhorn, 31, is a quarry resident who helps run the Artist Residency program. From a Canadian performing a one-woman rock opera to a Japanese dancer, the program has hosted a diverse array of artists who can best utilize the quarry’s resources, such as the dance studio built in the Warehouse, the main communal building onsite.

Beckhorn also helps book and manage performers for Sh’Bang, the largest event put on by residents of the quarry. What began about 10 years ago as an off-road soap box derby is now a three-day “festival of ideas” featuring dozens of live performers on five different stages. There are bands, circus performers, burlesque, puppetry and even a giant aerial piñata show. The stage areas themselves are also quite fun; one looks like a pirate ship, while another resembles a Wild West saloon.

“Basically, there’s too much going on, all the time,” says Sam Top, a 35-year-old installation artist who lives at the quarry part-time.

A Wonderful Place

Morgan “MoMo” Brown, a quarry resident, surveys her latest project: a “sunflower shower” allowing residents to bathe in the site’s greenhouse. Photo credit: Matt Benoit.

Each of the quarry’s residents seem to love this place for different but similar reasons.

For Nieh, it’s about having both a place to create and collaborators to do it with, being in nature, and being able to swim every day, even in winter, without clothes.

For Beckhorn, it’s the kindred spirits of the people and the landscape itself.

“By nature of what a quarry is, it’s extractive and exploitative of the land,” he says. “So, being in this site that’s been so damaged, and figuring out how to live with it in a way that’s more sustainable and mutually-supported, has been maybe the most exciting part for me.”

And for Top, it’s because the quarry community isn’t based around being a community; it’s based around creating something for others, whether it’s an event or a piece of art.

“The mission,” he says, “feels bigger than just making a nice place for us to be.”

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