(untitled) (Widening Circles)
Bluestone refuse from Lewis Hollow quarry, earth, and dead Ash tree inner bark and sapwood from Byrdcliffe’s White Pines property
height approx. 12'
2022
White Pines
Byrdcliffe Arts Colony
454 Upper Byrdcliffe Rd
Woodstock, NY
Opening Sun June 5 - Oct. 23 2022
The outdoor exhibition SHELTER includes 18 artists and is on view, dawn to dusk, at Byrdcliffe’s historic White Pines property at 454 Upper Byrdcliffe Road, Woodstock, NY. Exhibition maps and paths to each sculpture maintained to allow for public viewing while minimizing the impact on the natural environment.
Organized by Melinda Stickney-Gibson
My art practice attends to the fragile, entangled nature of our relationship to the material world by compelling curiosity and embodied perception. I am interested in the potential of space and materiality toward invoking long and discordant views of time, a sense of place, and relational awareness beyond the human. I work with materials as both trace and emergent speculation; bodies of memory with agency to create exchange and shift awareness.
For the SHELTER exhibition, I am interested in increasing awareness of, and deepening relations to, our surroundings as haven, habitat, and sanctuary by reclaiming materials with specific and layered histories from the site. At Byrdcliffe Colony, dead Ash trees and stacked bluestone center my sense experiences of the place, acting as markers in time, spectral boundaries, and beings who reveal and guide a perception of the ways we participate in widening material cycles through human, arboreal, and geological time.
I encountered the dead Ash tree further up the creek from its current location on my first visit to Byrdcliffe and stood inside its shell as snow flurries swirled around me, aware of and conjuring the smaller creatures it sheltered throughout its life, after its death, and into the present. Among many others, these included the Emerald Ash Borer, who left their mark on the shell and almost certainly caused the tree’s death (along with that of hundreds of millions of other Ash Trees in the United States), as well as woodpeckers, who like to make a home in Ash trees and eat the Emerald Ash Borer. My perceptions in this moment involved the Ash tree being both dead and generative, out of balance with its inhabitants but entangled in relations that create potential, even inevitable, balance, and of Ash trees being equally absent from the living world as critically endangered species and ubiquitously present as dead trace material bodies throughout the site. I was also suddenly aware of the wisdom held in the structure of the branches revealed inside the tree’s vacated shell, which point both to their origin and grow outward.
The standing shell of the Ash tree consists of parts of the phloem, cambium, and youngest sapwood, what were the living intermediary layers between the newly-forming tree growth and the non-living inner heartwood of the once-healthy tree. The Ash shell remains a literal and metaphorical threshold between the living and the dead, a kind of portal between the will-be and the was, an identifiable but decomposing body now habitat and sustenance for other species, a tangible form signaling absence. More specifically, the dead Ash’s fragility, fractures, layered structure, and the species’ vulnerability, pervasive presence as vegetal bodies in the landscape, and unraveling and re-weaving relations with other species are poignant signifiers of several particularly resonant qualities of the current ecological moment.
Marking a swath of geological activity through the landscape of the Catskills and Pennsylvania and shaping paths and boundaries through the modern constructed environment, bluestone is a unique material identified with the region. Bluestone acts as a way-finding material in the landscape in the form of walls, steps, and paving stones. I brought the bluestone for this project out of a local quarry rubbage pile, so the pieces have uneven faces and rounded edges (as opposed to the straight flat stones comprising nearby walls), and are comprised of finely ground feldspar that was densely compacted and cemented together into sandstone over thousands or millions of years. The irregular rounded stones complete the curved form of the tree on the open side of the piece’s Ash tree shell, hemming in the space of the tree’s absent body. I think of the relationship between the dead Ash tree and the bluestone in the way a tossed pebble and water animate one another. The stacked stones flow outward from the Ash shell, grounding stillness at the center while expanding the ring structure of the tree trunk in space and extending it in time.