These are some additional favorite pieces on Old Frog Pond Farm’s annual sculpture walk; ones commenting on their relationship with the landscape, or in the case of Catherine Evan’s Thistles, re-contextualizing industrial material into an organic setting. I became quite obsessed with the efficacy of her simple, striking installation. First, an interactive public writing piece on wood by Lynn Horsky:
This is one of those epiphany pieces where I can’t believe I didn’t think of this. Blink-bright pink zip ties could be a fantastic fungus from afar. They attach respectfully and artfully with no damage to the tree. They ride the line between beauty and humor, assimilation and contrast; they both decorate and celebrate.
Bill’s sled sculpture depicts the legacy of Concord’s famous sledding hill, precipitous and steep; graced by dynamic, sharp-edged steel and wood- vintage now, and weathered. They are given to visual abstraction.
I end this post with a Wendell Berry poem that perfectly captures the essence of my project here: its focus on what grows and weaves into a collective landscape, a view both expanded and collapsed into distillation. In short, much of my life has been full of struggle, worry and crises of identity, in part physiologically determined and embedded into any creative brain, in part from growing up in violence and navigating countless misguided messages. I’ve spent a lot of time looking for my footing, and searching for, to quote, the peace of wild things.
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
— Wendell Berry
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