Ingrained Care
Ingrained Care
Jennifer Drinkwater. Ingrained Care, acrylic and tempera on wood panel, 16” H x 20” W, 2022.
Ingrained Care arrives wired and ready to hang. My genius husband Aaron Swanson carefully crafts each panel with high-quality wood, mounting a smooth plywood surface onto a sturdy, mitred wooden frame that provides depth and support to the painting. The sides of the panel are sanded and finished for smoothness.
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Twenty percent of profits support the Mississippi Christian Family Services, an organization “chartered for providing family services with special concern for the distressed, underprivileged, and developmentally disabled in Sharkey County. Membership is open to all who subscribe to the purpose of the organization. A local bi-racial Board of Directors directs the program and a local bi-racial Advisory Committee function in an advisory capacity.”
The community story that inspired Ingrained Care….
In early November 2019, I spent a lovely afternoon with Julia Rodgers Clark and Drick Rodgers, a father-daughter farming duo, on their family farm outside of Rolling Fork in Sharkey County, Mississippi. I loved on horses, rode in a cotton picker, peeked into Mont Helena, and listened to remarkable family stories and histories.
When I visited the Rodgers in 2019, Sharkey County was recovering from months-long flooding of the Mississippi River. 550,000 acres in the Delta - literally half the land in the county - were underwater, due in large part to a lack of pumps, as Mississippi’s the only state along the lower Mississippi River with no pumps to address interior flooding.
This is all a little fuzzy, but best I can understand is that in 2008, the EPA blocked the construction of a pumping station that the Army Corps of Engineers had recommended, which the Mississippi Levee Board claims would have decreased the amount of flooding in the Mississippi Delta by at least one-third.
Many farmers, like the Rodgers, are doing their part to farm responsibly and sustainably: practicing reduced-till farming, planting grass strips along creeks that run through their property, maintaining grass ditches and waterways to catch silt and runoff, and relying on Phaucet, a Mississippi State University computer program, to conserve water.