On the interplay of cultural and natural elements in the forest landscape: An artist's perspective

Background/Question/Methods

Hidden in the New England forest are thousands of artifacts of human activity. Cellar holes reflect old house and barn foundations; stone walls mark property lines and agricultural fields; wolf trees disclose the whereabouts of pastures long overgrown; mill dams by the hundreds lay tumbled on the banks of rivers and forest streams. Harvard Forest is filled with cultural relics; the woods growing up and through them puts an ecological frame around these historic landscapes. I was interested in how this forest succession works, how I could depict it, and how to reconstruct the human ecology of colonial-era inhabitants by learning how they lived, used the land, and why they abandoned their farms, homes and way of life.

Results/Conclusions

Over an eight-month residency, I created more than 70 mixed media works and drawings from twenty-three sites in and around Harvard Forest. Most of the work was produced in the field, from the snows of March through the buggy spring and summer up to the snows of November.  Pieces begun onsite were often completed in a studio space at Harvard Forest. I collected case histories from farm ledgers, diaries and letters in the Harvard Forest archives as well as those of the township of Petersham, and interviewed local citizens whose families went back so many generations they were essentially walking, talking history books.

As an artist, I witnessed the ways in which natural succession softens the edge of human disturbance, and marveled at the long shadow we still manage to cast across landscape and centuries. A craze for merino sheep in the early 19^th century sparks a stone wall building boom, overgrazing and soil erosion; an 18^th century farmer’s tannery serves the local economy but depletes local hemlocks and sends toxic chemicals downstream past his own cider mill; introduction of chestnut blight decimates one of the Eastern landscape’s signature trees.

The collection of artworks from this residency reflects the interplay of time, place and change. It tells the story of how farm fields and small factories were reclaimed by a thriving forest, how change is a constant condition, and how, in the end, nature takes back what man abandons.