Art in
the Forest

There is a lineage of artists who went to the land and made work from what they found there. Goldsworthy stacking ice, arranging leaves, coiling sticks in still water. Smithson mapping entropy into enormous earthworks. Nils-Udo nesting forms inside the forest as if the forest had dreamed them. Nancy Holt turning light and shadow into astronomical instruments. What these artists shared was a refusal to treat the landscape as backdrop — they understood it as collaborator, as material, as force.

The work planned for this forest belongs to that lineage but departs from it in one crucial way. Those artists visited landscapes and left. Here, the making happens inside a long-term relationship with a specific place. The artist who will work in this forest will also have planted trees in it, cleared competing stems around particular oaks, watched the understory respond to canopy gaps, learned the names of the species that seed in after a disturbance. The art emerges from stewardship rather than alongside it.

This collapse of boundaries is the point. When you clear competing stems around a promising young oak, you are already making compositional decisions: which tree gets light, which shape of canopy emerges over time, what the clearing will look like from below in thirty years. When you stack slash into habitat piles rather than burning it, you are composing — placing form in the landscape with attention to structure, texture, habitat value, and the slow drama of decomposition. The boundary between forest management and artistic practice dissolves when both are understood as forms of tending.

The first works will be site-specific and ephemeral: arrangements of stone, bark, and found wood in stream corridors; spiral forms from the autumn leaf fall of specific species, documenting the composition of particular patches in particular years; cairn structures that serve simultaneously as sculptures and as water-level gauges in dry seasons. A cairn placed in a stream is a sculpture. It's also a check on water level. A spiral of fallen leaves documents the wind. Every forest artwork is also data. Every act of maintenance is also composition.

The geometric light work that has been developing under the name Radiant Arrays will find its most resonant setting here, in this forest. Light changes everything in a woodland: the canopy filters and fractures it, moving leaves strobe it, canopy gaps concentrate it into shafts that shift through the day like slow spotlights. The forest is already doing something with light — the work planned here extends that logic with explicit geometric intention.

The installations take the form of nail-and-wood panels: precise arrangements of nails in geometric patterns on weathered board, strung with monofilament or fine wire that catches light differently at different angles and times of day. Positioned at points where light enters the forest — at canopy gaps, along stream corridors, on south-facing clearing edges — the panels interact with natural light through the day and through seasons. At dawn they catch one color temperature. At noon another. In winter low-angle light the geometry shifts completely. The same panel never looks the same twice.

Temporary artificial installations will explore the forest at night: arrays of warm light sources mounted in the understory, revealing spatial relationships that daylight and shadow normally hide. The structure of the forest — its layering, its lateral patterning, its depth — becomes legible in a different way when illuminated from within rather than from above. The nail-and-wood substrate in these installations echoes bark and branch texture; the geometry echoes the growth patterns of the trees themselves.

The forest provides material in abundance. Stone from the stream corridor and ridge outcrops. Branches from storm damage and selective removal. Bark and root systems from trees that fall in their own time. Ice in winter — one of the most responsive and beautiful materials available, requiring only temperature and water and a cold night. Moss, which attaches itself to placed stones and records the moisture regime of its location over years.

Working with found materials means working with time. Ice documents temperature — a form made from the water column of a particular winter night melts when that winter ends. Cairns constructed from stream stones document water level across seasons: the moss line, the high-water debris, the staining of the stone all accumulate as a record of what the water has done. A spiral of fallen leaves made in late October, when the maples have dropped first and the oaks are still holding, is a document of that specific forest community in that specific year. The work keeps notes that other methods cannot.

This temporality is not a limitation. It's the point. When you make something that the forest will disassemble — the ice that melts, the leaf arrangement that the wind rearranges, the stick structure that the snow compresses — you are practicing the same acceptance that good stewardship requires. The forest has its own agenda, its own timescales, its own sense of composition. Tending and making share the same gesture: picking something up, placing it with care, and accepting that the forest will have the last word about how long it stays.

These are the works that will be made here. The titles exist before the objects do — which is itself a form of forest mind, a way of naming the attention before directing it. As works are created and documented, this gallery will grow. Like the forest itself, it develops on its own schedule.