Thursday, August 14, 2014

Wilderness 50: Artist's Statement




In thinking about this show, I wanted to explore how we modern Americans deeply need and celebrate our wilderness environments. Particularly, I am curious about the possibilities and resources that these protected areas provide for us as a species within an ecosystem. I chose trees to provide the structure and focus for this series. Most wildernesses have trees, and I wanted to look at how untouched trees have adapted in different climate zones creating the complex mature ecosystem possible in a wilderness.  I also wanted to see how humans adapt to those climates and how they may possibly interact with a specific wilderness.

I became attracted to the metaphor of “cambium”, a tree layer between the inner bark and the wood, which produces new bark on the outside and new wood on the inside of trunks, stems, and roots originating all growth and forming the annual rings of wood. Like trees, human learning and growth occurs on both the outside and the inside simultaneously, the bark and rings becoming a sort of memory of experience. 

In the painting Cambium: Wet, I worked with winter dormant bigleaf maples and red alders found in the Rock Creek Wilderness rain forest near the Oregon coast. I show the cutthroat trout solely found in the pristine streams that flow into the ocean from the Pacific Northwest coast range. 




Another winter piece, Cambium: Dry has water sensitive black cottonwood from Central Oregon high desert where development is a huge challenge in the fragile desert ecosystem. 



My summer piece is Lost In Time. This enormous old Douglas-fir is located in the Rougue Umpqua Divide wilderness and is covered with old man’s beard moss. 


 

Wilderness 50: The Retreat


In June I hiked into the Boulder Creek Wilderness with three of the artists who will be showing with me in the Wilderness 50 show. We were focused on the burned over forest and examining the regeneration that has occurred since the wildfires of 1996 and 2008. We found much to be glad about. Among the standing charred trees were many many young trees. Native wildflowers were varied and abundant, and the extravantly white and lavender blooming ceanothus were a shoulder high cloud  in the black stemmed understory. The forest was very much alive and thriving.