Poppies. The Fancy Poppies, as I call them, not the smaller, orange kind that grow on roadsides (though we do have a few of those around, too). These are descendants of one packet of seeds a friend shared with me about ten years ago. They come up in various places every year. When the weather is right (cool nights, not much rain, as it was this year), they are a grand feature in the late May and early June yard.
Patricia Wallbertson, our June resident, was lucky enough to witness their fantastic transmutations from bowed bud to erect open bloom to petals falling and seedhead emerging. Each day she’d spend time visiting the poppies in the yard, watching their process of becoming and unbecoming. She would stare at them, draw them, later adding textural paints she created using some of the soil from the creek or yard.
More samples of Patricia’s work inspired by her time at Sourwood Forest can be found at Patricia.
Patricia was impressed by the diversity of forms, textures, and ecological processes happening all over– from poppies in the yard to decomposing logs in the woods to the shadows, light, and moods of Melody Creek. She was interested in soils, the decomposition process that they embody, their differences and the way in which they define a place. She surprised me by how much she delved into the opportunity to connect with the environment specific to this place. She seemed to let it guide her process rather than her being driven by preconceived ideas or abstract intentions about what she wanted to make happen.
One of the pieces she made here is gradually merging into the front yard: a clay human figure prone on the ground with hands outstretched holding onto string. The strings stretch up to a redbud sapling about three feet above the small body, and their ends attach to a piece of clay- stained cloth. The cloth is the one Patricia had between her hands and the clay as she molded the body’s shape. The image left on the fabric seems a sort of apparition of the body’s creation. We enjoyed talking about what meanings this combination of form, string, and cloth might offer a viewer. I imagine the clay figure as a man prostrate in a kind of prayer, as if he sees the image of his own creation and thinks it is the face of God. The clay-stained cloth is an idol he worships as it flutters in the wind.
The other sculpture she created is affixed with mud from Melody Creek’s bottom to a log lying across that creek.
We took several walks on the loop trail through Sourwood Forest, which includes crossing that creek, and she explored the woods without me as well. For the piece she molded to the fallen log, she used a barkless, long-dead heartwood segment of a white pine trunk, a section still showing the whorled branching pattern characteristic of that species. She attached it to the fallen log such that, at first glance, it could seem a part of the fallen log. But if one knows the place and understands its naturally occurring forms, a closer look reveals the truth. I found it interesting that she said she thought she’d form another clay man there, but had instead been led to contrive a form more naturally at home in that particular place in the woods than a human could have been. At the time of its creation, her piece created an interesting interplay between nature-formed and human-generated. And how the piece changes over time (I promised to send her photos) adds the element that seemed to most interest her: how physical realities like time, water, light, temperature, and pressure impact form, material, and line.
I was happy to find that Patricia was willing to help with a few garden-related chores. She learned firsthand about the different kinds of ruggedness between a shrub and a vine, for instance, and which prunings were tastiest for goats. Feeding them what we took out of the yard was the best part. She was also entranced by the variety and constancy of bird life around the house, it being a time of various active nests and quite a few fledglings in their first phases of flight, still being fed by anxious parents. A Carolina wren sat hidden in her nest inside the potted lily plant not two feet away from where we ate most of our meals and talked for long periods, hummingbirds whizzing around our heads, squirrels distracting us, goats in the nearby pasture entertaining us with their intriguing, incongruous ways.
Patricia’s stay here made me hopeful for the future. It was encouraging to meet a young person set on bringing positive change to the world by way of how she lives as an artist, what she might create, as well as through the interactions and serendipity that will likely inform her creative process.
While Patricia was here, she helped me dismantle the old compost pile (which meant moving buckets of dirt from one place to another in the front garden). That task proved more interesting than we expected. As we started moving shovel-fulls of dirt from the pile, we uncovered and interrupted a copperhead and a black snake, just inches from each other, each evidently interested in homing themselves there. Something about the way that copperhead looked and acted made me sure she was getting ready to give birth there (copperheads deliver live young, rather than lay eggs). I was wondering if what I’d heard about black snakes running off copperheads from such habitat, and claiming it for their own, would be true in this case. So after we’d moved all we could move without disturbing them further, we left them to work it out. I was rooting for the black snake.