MINE/NOT MINE was installed in High Visibility: On Location in Rural America and Indian Country at Plains Art Museum (Fargo, ND) Nov 2020 - May 2021 and
To Hold the Land at Furlong Gallery (University of Wisconsin Stout) in Nov/Dec 2021

MINE/NOT MINE is a collaborative work with artist Shanai Matteson. Using her recorded words and sound from her construction of a quilt, the piece questions female identity in extraction industries. Part of Pajunen's long-term project "Mine Songs: Sounding an Altered Landscape," Pajunen recorded Matteson's words in a mine shovel at the Hull Rust Mahoning Mine, one of the largest open pit iron mines in the world and near Pajunen's home town of Hibbing, MN. The video is from LaRue pit lake in Nashwauk, MN - geologic time ripped open, left to fill with rain and spring water. What is taken from us in areas where commitment to resource extraction is the dominant cultural narrative?

“Pajunen’s work establishes how the materials, landscapes, and personal stories of home can radiate an interior, emotional reality that defamiliarizes our relationship to place or, if an outsider, our orientation to the assumptions about a region often set in stereotype. This attention to valuing forms of local, cultural life that would either be ignored or related to distancing notions of “fieldwork,” is an aesthetic shared with Matteson, whose efforts as an artist, writer, and community organizer have been a galvanizing presence across many rural and urban spaces.

In Matteson’s Mine/Not Mine contribution, an extension of her Overburden/Overlook creative research and engagement practice, Matteson gathered fabric and fiber from women in her community to create relief prints that she stitches together to create story quilts, bandanas, or flags. This fabric is also dyed with overburden, the waste rock extracted and discarded through the mining process.

The intimate, generational act of stitching becomes a foundation for considering the relationships between the extractive practices on the Iron Range and the damage they have inflicted on the peoples and communities whose lives support these industries. The sound piece Pajunen contributes here is sourced from Matteson’s dying, printing, and sewing of this fabric, and is accompanied by Matteson’s writing and voice, recorded inside a mine shovel at the Hull Rust overlook in Hibbing, Minnesota.” (Matthew Fluharty)

Composition, video, and recording / Sara Pajunen
Words and voice / Shanai Matteson
Recorded in Palisade, MN and at Hull Rust Mine View in Hibbing, MN
Mixed by Ted Reichman