Until the age of nine, my experience of the woods was limited to suburban woodlands near my grandparents’ house in New York state, the ravines of Toronto, and — when I was eight — a small patch of trees in Yorkshire near a rose garden. All of those places felt tidy and safe: light foliage underfoot, space between young trees, and the reassuring presence of nearby houses. But those are not the woods that stay with me — the ones that keep resurfacing in my mind and compel me to shape bark, flowers, insects, and fierce birds. The woods that do that are the ones outside the village of Lansdowne, Ontario, where my family lived from the time I was nine until I was fifteen, in a cold farmhouse on a dirt road surrounded by ninety-two acres of the Canadian Shield, with a slice of field running through the property and acres and acres of dense, gnarly forest where bark peeled in chunks and smelled of rich earth. A forest where brambles scratched my legs until they bled, where sunlight streamed through trees, where I took refuge after the daily routine of being bullied at the village school, where pink honeysuckle glistened, and where rot and growth were constant companions. It was in that forest where I learned to like the stillness of my thoughts and to let them quiet until I could lose myself to the sensory experiences of my surroundings. Without knowing the term or concept, I found a sit spot — which I was very much in need of.
Those woodlands appeared in my night dreams as boys with hearts decaying like old bark, as trees filled with red-eyed wolves, as streams teeming with cephalopods. In daydreams, I thought of the honeysuckle, trillions of trilliums, and the thin ice giving way to rushing water in early spring. Sitting in the clearing in the woods behind the Lansdowne farmhouse, I discovered that beauty and unease can coexist and that decay is not an end by part of a cycle.
My sculptures for The Clearing don't try to recreate the woods but to evoke the sensation of them — the mixture of curiosity and hesitation. What we discard doesn’t vanish, instead it becomes something else.
Other people have kindly documented The Clearing with photographs and writing:
Daniel Gill-Sitoski
Donovan Perra
Elaine M. Power
Mark Sinnet
Thanks to the City of Kingston Art Fund, City of Kingston Public Art, and the Agnes Etherington Art Gallery for supporting The Clearing.
