Installations

Landscape Arrangements

My landscape arrangements use materials found in the landscape that I use as my canvas. I arrange feathers, pebbles, twigs in the context I find them in, often interacting with larger elements in the landscape, like boulders, roots, or branches. These are compositions that are often camouflaged as related to their color and textures, as they were found in the context of that canvas. The shapes I arrange often are responses expressed in what I find—pebbles arranged in a crevice or on a branch or ledge, or twigs tracing a root system. On Cranberry Island my canvas was a tidal pool, and the material I arranged on it was driftwood and cable bits of various lengths I found along the island’s shoreline. The added thrill was the tide that would fill the tidal plain within hours after I installed my debris assemblages, often adding seaweed and other sea vegetation, and always a reflection in the watery plain. When I was there the plain was a perfectly smooth mirror until the late afternoon when a breeze would ripple the surface. This exchange with the tide I enjoyed greatly.

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Landscape Interactions

Installations I consider “landscape interactions” are pieces I create for and place in the landscape as if the landscape were a gallery. These pieces are designed and created to highlight an aspect of the natural environment, the view, the sounds, the wind—to see and appreciate the beauty as if in an art museum.

The Great Mother Conference is an annual event in which artists of any discipline gather for nine days of mythopoetic exploration in the woods of Maine. I served as Gallery Director for four years, curating the art gallery experience. I also brought and created my own work, including The Blue Feather, Art View/Forest View, and Leaves (see below). The art gallery participants keep story themes in mind, juxtaposing and grouping works resonating with each other, whether by way of parallels or contrasts in subject matter, palette, or medium for participants to discover and explore.

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The Blue Feather

P.O.V. Views

The Velvet Rope placed in a space that can be approached from both sides invites to appreciate the seen through the lens of a labels mounted to the stanchions holding it. At an art gallery, is the art displayed what you’re looking at or is it the fellow attendees that draw you to the gallery opening. How aware are you on a walk on a peninsula where the forest stops and the lake begins, that your feet are dry?

What if the label drops and cracks, or the stanchions collapse? What labels, what lenses are you viewing your world, the world with? Today? Tomorrow?

Leaves

Five leaf-shaped frames representing the five most common tree species in the Maine landscape invited participants to fill in the opening with their homage to the natural world, and later in the week as a focus to view a detail of the landscape through, to meditate on it, to draw, or write a poem in response.

Vote Here

A open voting booth fashioned with fallen branches with a burlap privacy curtain invites to respond to images of artworks, by answering multiple choice question, some more (ir)relevant than others. What do you cross off? What is your criteria for crossing off? What do you do if you find the writing implement offered is a twig?

How do you view the voting booth when it surrounds a live tree? Would you add a line to the collective poem pinned onto its bark?