Artist Ben Lincoln donates drawing to Mill Museum

Mount Desert Island artist Ben Lincoln presents his drawing of the early stages of the demolition of the Bucksport Paper Mill to the Bucksport Paper Mill Museum to be temporarily displayed at the Town Office until the Museum is ready to do so.

August 8, 2024

At the Bucksport Town Council meeting on August 8, 2024, artist Ben Lincoln presented his drawing, Decommissioning, which depicts the early stages of the demolition of the Bucksport Paper Mill. Lincoln donated his drawing to the Bucksport Paper Mill Museum where it will be displayed once the building is ready. In the meantime, the drawing will be on display at the Bucksport Town Office.

During the meeting, the Town Council also recognized the 60th anniversary of the Bucksport Historical Society. You can read more about that here.

Decommissioning artist statement by Ben Lincoln:

Starting in 2014 when I first heard that the Verso mill in Bucksport would close I began making periodic trips from my home on MDI to photograph the mill at various stages of its decommissioning. It wasn’t clear to me at the time what I would do with the photographs, I just knew that I wanted to bear witness to the mill’s passage. 

At the most basic level, I’ve always felt that my role as an artist is to create some kind of meaning with my work. This project was very different though because I believe the generations of men and women who worked in the mill have already created a meaning far more powerful than anything I could generate, and I don’t feel it’s up to me to say whether or how my drawing evokes that meaning. What is much more present in my own mind is the meaning I found along the way in making it. 

The philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote, “art is the setting into work of truth”. Artistic practice usually involves a lot of creative and aesthetic decision making, but I deliberately set all that aside as I worked on this drawing. What I was left with was simply the work, the manual labor of rendering the image. It was a very different relationship to a project than I’ve experienced before and I found myself reflecting on a slight inversion of Heidegger’s words. Regardless of whether it takes place in a paper mill, an artist’s studio or any other venue in which human skill and expertise are employed, I think there is an underlying “truth of work” that is perhaps worth reminding ourselves of at a time when work is changing so rapidly for so many people.

Decommissioning by Ben Lincoln shows the mill after demolition had begun.