Story

Notitia Sanctuary is the Vermont home of American artist Jonathan Jennings Harris, built in 2020 and now available for others to experience through weekly stays.

Origins

Notitia was created by Jonathan Jennings Harris, an American multimedia artist known for his wide-ranging work with data, story, ritual, and wisdom.

After many years of working with the digital world, in 2015 Jonathan returned to his family’s ancestral land in Vermont, seeking to reengage with the physical world and the rhythms of nature. He wanted to explore the practice of “Life Art” — art that takes life itself as the medium by working with an actual life situation as the frame for the work over time. He spent the next seven years immersed in the world of High Acres Farm — performing and filming a series of twenty-one rituals; transforming his grandparents’ home into a beloved contemporary gathering place; designing and installing a network of twenty-seven “lightning transformers” across forty acres of land; and completing Notitia Sanctuary, a home and place of retreat.

The initial vision for Notitia arrived in a vivid dream on the night of February 7, 2017. Earlier that day, Jonathan had slipped in the ice, causing the cardboard model of an earlier design to fall and break apart in the snow. Notitia Sanctuary was completed exactly three years later, with his first night sleeping there being February 7, 2020.

Now, after six years as a private home, Notitia is also available for others to experience — through weekly rentals to families, friends, couples, and fellow creative practitioners. An artist residency program will be announced in the future.

A place of deep peace and great beauty, Notitia is dedicated to embodied experience and the realization of dreams.

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Notitia is located within High Acres Farm — a gathering place for human culture and the natural world. The High Acres Farm symbol combines a strand of human DNA with the rolling hills of the land — expressing the philosophy of Human | Nature.

The initial drawing of Notitia Sanctuary was made from a dream on February 7, 2017.

The 21 rituals of In Fragments are concisely expressed through this mandala that uses the iconic geometry of Electric Webb, placed against the waters of Lake Champlain.

Electric Webb is a network of twenty-seven custom-designed “lightning transformers” planted across forty acres of land, encompassing High Acres Farm in a prayer mandala woven into the landscape, reminiscent of the iconic quilt designs that Jonathan's great-grandmother, Electra Havemeyer Webb, used to collect in her Shelburne Museum.

Notitia’s insignia communicates the seven “Circles of Care” that Jonathan outlined through his work with Sunlight Papers — offering a simple map for scaling attention across Body, Mind, Home, Love, Work, Help, and World, all arising within the field of awareness that’s symbolized by the outermost ring of twenty-seven dots.

Notitia’s Farmhouse Table was found at an old antiques shop near Vergennes, Vermont, where it was sitting outside, covered in snow, with peeling shellac and badly weathered graying wood. According to the proprietor, it had been sitting there for more than twenty years, so she offered to sell it for just sixty dollars. When Jonathan brought the table back to Notitia, he examined it more closely, and noticed that down by its base, it was engraved with a series of concentric circles and a row of wooden balls. After counting them carefully, he was astonished to find that they matched Notitia’s already-designed Circles of Care insignia precisely — six inner circles and twenty-seven balls — as though the old wooden table had somehow always been part of Notitia.

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