Cabinet of the Wilding Hours

A repurposed gypsy vardo, rebuilt into a naturalist’s wagon: overgrown, half-abandoned, part reliquary, part fort, part self-portrait. It is built to the length of a body and tall enough to stand inside, and the drawings inside are pinned like field notes.

“It began with walks,” Krumpos says of the work, “along limestone bluffs, through cedar groves, beside marshes stirred by cranes and wind. In those quiet, attentive hours, I walked without a map. The creatures in these watercolor studies are not imagined inventions. They are kin of fog and field, met with ritual, solitude, and the wild quiet of place. They are what remain when you walk long enough to fall out of ordinary time.”

The wagon imagines a field naturalist who slipped out of that ordinary time, leaving the archive behind. Watercolor studies of the “widdershins,” the small spirit-creatures of an overlooked wild, hang alongside the ordinary tools of paying attention: graphite nubs and dirtied brushes, a water jar clouded with pigment, pressed plants, wax seals, a pouch of carved stones, an envelope of animal hair labeled for return. The objects and images act as specimens in a kind of animist science, a tender, poetic taxonomy of what remains when land is listened to as alive. Nothing is explained. You come to the work not as an audience but as a posthumous witness, left to find the story in the objects.

The making runs back to a century-old hobby farm in northeast Wisconsin, where Krumpos grew up cobbling inventions from his father’s cast-iron machinery and gathering a lifelong kinship for bric-a-brac and found objects. The wagon is the grown-up version of the fort. “My practice is shaped by bioregional animism, poetic ethnography, and grief as method,” he says. “I draw not to categorize, but to keep memory company. Each image is a glyph in a larger, unfolding cosmology, one that resists enclosure, favors mystery, and insists on the presence of spirit in place.”

Cabinet of the Wilding Hours was shown in “The Wilding Hours,” a two-person exhibition with Erin LaBonte at the Besse Gallery on the Bay College Escanaba campus, with a reception and artist talk on November 20, 2025. LaBonte’s cyanotype-on-fabric work, printed in her garden across three summers and edged by her mother’s hand, rose along the gallery walls around the wagon. At the close of the show, the gallery acquired the wagon and one of its watercolor studies for the college’s permanent collection.

Widdershins Project Archive · File 3A-9