On February 13th, 2024, I sent out an email for people to come to my studio and make Fertility Balls. People used various organic ingredients to produce testicle and egg-like things as gifts to Mother Nature and the Soo-Line Dump, a 140 year old mitigated dumpsite on the edge of Shoreham Yards, an industrial train and truck facility near my house in Northeast Minneapolis. The handmade eggs and testicles have been stuffed with items such as rich dirt, seeds, hair, dried flowers, egg shells, as well as hopes, dreams and well wishes. A communal rite of spring at the end of April will see the balls collectively and ceremoniously launched into the Dump. Poetry and costumes are encouraged.
Included in the email was the following information about the site for which the gifts are intended: The Soo-Line Dump is located on a peat bog at the southern end of what was once Sandy Lake, now Columbia Golf Course in Northeast Minneapolis. For approximately 100 years the bog was used by the Soo-Line railroad and city of Minneapolis for the disposal of plastic, glass, metal, brick, concrete, wood, gypsum board, nails, ash, tar, coal, alkaline batteries, rug fragments, slag debris, rail car sweepings and what the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency noted as a “yellow powder”. In the 1970s there were many citizen “hotline complaints” of illegal dumping on the site, but no clean-up effort was made until 1988. Per Superfund remediation requirements, the methane-emitting bog and waste material was covered with a permeable geo-textile, three feet of “virgin soil” and is now considered contained. It currently functions as temporary refuge for fox, deer, badger, multiple groundhogs, native and invasive plant species, myriad pollinators and other insects, as well as 82 documented species of birds.
