Last week, I immersed myself into the process of making trail
art as a lived experience and I was immediately confronted with a moral
dilemma. Since I had already harvested all the young saplings trees in my own
back yard during the last 2 weekends, I ventured forth into the woods across
the street from my house where I proceeded to cut down 8 young trees, each
approximately 1 inch in diameter at the ground level. Now, I am not proud of this act because I am
quite certain that the heavily wooded lot belongs to a neighbor who no longer
lives in the neighborhood. In
retrospect, I should have walked ½ mile down the road where the high tension
wires cross my street because I am quite sure that the land there is publicly
owned. Or if not public land, I suspect
it may be owned by the local utility company, who actually might have
appreciated my efforts to remove some of the saplings that they typically
remove themselves every few years.
However, to avoid this moral dilemma in the future, I suppose I should contact
a local land owner or the power company to obtain permission to harvest trees
on their property
In spite of this moral experience, I learned a few things
about making trail art. But first, let
me define trail art. My definition of
trail art is art that is constructed mostly out of natural objects found in
nature such as trees, branches, vines, bushes, flowers, stones, moss, flowers and
unnatural objects such as wire, metal, iron, string, plastic, etc. This definition is based on my observations
of trail art at several places including The Fruitlands in Harvard, MA, the
Andres Institute of Art in Brookline, NH and the Midstate Trail in Princeton,
MA. I have not been able to find a public
definition of trail art. However, I did find a definition for sculpture
trail or sculpture walk. A sculpture
trail is “a walkway through open-air galleries of outdoor sculptures along a defined route with sequenced viewings
encountered from planned preview and principal sight lines” (Wikipedia, 2012). Virtually all of the trail art I have viewed
appears to have been harvested when it was alive. I deduce this from the condition of the wood
and the appearance of its flexible properties.
Therefore it would appear that making trail art can be an
environmentally unfriendly endeavor because live trees are just so much more
flexible than dead ones.
One lesson I learned was that making trail art out of doors can
be quite uncomfortable. Last weekend the
skies were overcast, the wind was biting and leaves were blowing everywhere as
I scoured the woods for appropriate-sized saplings. Thorny bushes and prickly underbrush clung to
my clothes as ducked under branches and crawled over deadfall. I knelt on soggy ground to saw through the
young saplings and stumbled often as I pulled the downed trees though the thick
under growth. Back in my backyard, I
crouched down in an uncomfortable position to trim all the small branches off
the saplings. Then I ran a long extension cord from my garage to the
backyard to power a drill outfitted with a 1-inch drill bit that I happened to
have in my tool box from years ago. I
used it to drill 6 1-inch holes in two pieces of firewood that were 18 inches long.
I carefully threaded the saplings though
each of the holes, often pausing to trim the nubs closer to the shaft to allow
them to slip through the holes. The sun came out while I was threading the saplings through the wood. See the close up photo below.
My
design for this piece of trail art was inspired by a work of art I discovered
at The Fruitlands, in Harvard, MA, a few weeks ago which was made up of a dozen or so saplings,
standing upright and threaded through a series of holes that had been drilled
in two pieces of wood. See both the
inspiration for my design on the left as well as my own attempt on the right in
the photos below. Note that my piece
includes a vine that I took from the woods across the street. It was about 20 ft long and I simply wove the
vine in the shape of a Christmas wreath and placed it between the branches.
The other thing I learned this week was that trail art can
be inspired anywhere. For example, on
Halloween, I attended a Mask exhibit at Lincoln Studios, in Waltham, MA. At the exhibit, I noticed a human figure
constructed out of small branches. What
interested me the most was how the artist used small screw eyes to connect the
arms and legs to the body because this technique mimicked our own body joints
and as a result made the figure appear more life-like. After visiting a local hardware store to
stock up on several sizes of screw eyes, I began to construct a human figure
like the one in the exhibit out of the small branches I had trimmed off of the
saplings noted above. I had to improvise
a bit to find an object to use for the torso and head eventually locating two
curved pieces of wood bark in my wood pile that had peeled off of a log but
remained surprisingly strong. Then I used
my chain saw to cut a slice of a round log about 10 inches in diameter to use
for the head. I connected the branches
to the head and torso using the screw eyes. Unfortunately, I cannot show the photos in this post, because I have exceed the size.
One of the
interesting properties of both pieces of trail art is that they are made in
such a way that they gently move with only a very mild breeze, which I think is
a nice quality because it may cause it to be noticed more easily than if it
were stationary.
