Fruitlands Museum Artist In Residence


INTERSECTION


Wind mass exerts unsettling forces upon a mature tree in full leaf, challenging the tree’s core integrity. Mighty oaks express a power of fiber and substance that is both flexible and resolutely impenetrable. Such is the subject: resilient, fortified, structurally impressive.


Piercing and splitting this living oak was an act of arrogance. It was a concerted attack. Wedges were beaten in with sledgehammers. Tapered spacers tore fleshy bark and steely wood grain. Progress into the heart of the trunk was earned incrementally. Fibers yielded over time, groaning and snapping long after each new assault. Driven steel against oak hard. Violence in slow motion. Bare logs penetrated the resulting split wound. These shards suspend against the forest canopy and expose evidence of the man/oak confrontation. My will has been expressed. The oak lives on. It has resisted mightily and suffered, but it has not succumbed to the attack.



This work is not solely the resulting marks of bare line in greenscape nor is it the performative battle. It is both: that present demarcation, and the experience - expressed simultaneously. INTERSECTION is a defiant challenge to my own physical presence and the legacy of ideas documented.



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ROCK GARDEN TUTORIAL




The classic garden at the Ryoanji Temple places an expectation upon the viewer. Patterns of raked gravel surrounding monumental stones present a language of seascape and islands. The ambition of this traditional rock garden is not representational. The design intent is an evocation of place.


The deep shade of a white pine grove – with its perfect vertical trunks and dappled sunlight – is a stage for this drama of buoyancy. Mass is redefined and belief is suspended as insubstantial sapling boats levitate boulders. The event provokes a visceral response. One’s body calculates the weight and is confounded. The design intent is a provocation of perception.


Most boats rely on the surface defined by two medium. They are masters of interface. The boats in ROCK GARDEN TUTORIAL defy media and transform the sensation of solid. They create new symbols and suggest a language that we understand without knowing. These boats, loaded with boulders, transport dreams. Weighty imaginings buoyed preposterously.



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DIVINING FAULT




Divining Fault is a story of unknowable forces. Deep fractures and separations. A tree sheared lengthwise suspended in two parts. This golden exposure, these raw wooden lines, are a calligraphic stroke that speaks a message of searching for blame.

sawn beech, saplings