MAY THROUGH NOVEMBER 2021. Commissioned by the National Forest Foundation and developed in collaboration with the Lake Tahoe West Restoration Partnership, this temporary public artwork is at the Taylor Creek Visitor Center, a US Forest Service site near South Lake Tahoe.
Drone and installation photography courtesy of the California Tahoe Conservancy. For the drawings on which the installation is based, click HERE.
Reading tree rings - dendrochronology - allows us to piece together information from the past. Fires, precipitation, and insects all register in the growth rings of trees. In this artwork, we ‘read’ ourselves into the rings - our own reflections on resilience, connection and change, just as we project our own values, insights and blind spots onto the natural world.
Quotes were adapted to make sense out of their original context, and sometimes, to turn fancy into plain language while keeping the meaning intact. For the phrases in the drawings and their sources, click HERE. In this one a draft management report is combined with one of artist Jenny Holzer’s “Truisms”.
A phrase from Kat Anderson’s Tending the Wild is encircled by Wallace Stephens’ Six Significant Landscapes: “interactions with nature should demonstrate true relationship, which implies reciprocity, continuity, familiarity, and continual learning”… and: “not all the knives of the lamposts, nor the chisels of the long streets, nor the mallets of the domes and high towers, can carve what one star can carve, shining through the leaves” Two descriptions, or two perspectives on the same idea?
The number and sizes of the drawings were determined by the distribution and kinds of trees in a healthy Sierra forest - very few large trees, a few more medium and many small ones.
Presenting artwork in an environment like Lake Tahoe is both inspiring and daunting. But in the end, perhaps it’s not different than a living room wall, gallery or museum: artwork and place form a contiguous experience.
In developing the installation, I sketched approximate locations into a satellite image of the area. Original drawings were digitized and printed on Alumigraphics Grip, a slip-resistant, adhesive-backed film. Printing was done at Landmark Grafix in San Leandro, the images were hand cut and sorted into groups for each area. For the original drawings on which the installation is based, please click HERE.
For the original drawings, click HERE.