Thursday I went over to the Hapgood Wright Town Forest to check out the latest iteration of the Umbrella Community Arts Center’s Art Ramble.
The center’s website says, “In honor of Henry David Thoreau’s 200th birthday, this exhibit encourages artists to create work that slows the viewer’s experience of the natural world.”
I enjoyed finding the art tucked away here and there in the woods, and I also enjoyed the beauties of the forest: a Great Blue Heron standing patiently in the middle of a pond where I could hear a bullfrog croaking, a beautiful fallen log with wavy lines, Indian Pipe fungi hidden among dry leaves.
The first of the art pieces that I chose to photograph was Mary Baum’s “Point of Entry,” a construction of mirrors covering a rock. Baum says that, in general, “her work deals with themes of belief and mysticism; the connection between the natural and spiritual worlds; and the relationship between magic and miracle.”
The second work I photographed was called “Forest for the Tree” and features small jars holding bits of tree arranged around a trunk.
Self-taught conceptual artist Heather Kapplow says the work “plays with the movement of consciousness or attention between the big picture and the more granular one (with its emphasis resting on the consciousness or attention of one particular tree). It exists as a liminal object, one that touches two worlds and acts as the passageway between. It allows the viewer to consider that there is more to our existence than what meets the eye.” (If you take children, you may want to find a way to translate artistspeak here and elsewhere around the woods.)
My favorite work was an array of “knotholes” by clay sculptor Liz Fletcher, who creates environmental art because she is “concerned about human impacts on the land.”
The title of her contribution is “Lovers of Life,” and features portraits of people who walked gently on the land, such as Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, and Black Elk, a Oglala Lakota (Sioux), who lived from 1863 to 1950.
Fletcher says, ” ‘Lovers of Life’ is an outdoor portrait gallery. Embedded within knotholes are images of people from various eras and cultures who devoted their creative energies to studying and protecting the natural world, and encouraging people to live in harmony with it. Knotholes on trees show where branches once grew out from the trunk. Knotholes are fine frames for these naturalists and spiritual leaders whose ideas have branched out across the world.”
I wrote about last year’s Art Ramble here.
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