Woods Craft
An East Falls exhibit spotlights work of ''the woodlanders."By Don Sapatkin. The Philadelphia Inquirer (August 5, 2006).
Vicki Fox's eyes widened at the sight of an upended tree's tangled roots off the trail. "Look at all that moss," she said, her voice turning guttural with excitement, like a jazz singer's. "That moss is, like, totally irresistible!"
She reached for clumps.
Fox is a player in nature. She walks in the woods for spiritual connection. She collects seeds because she always has. She creates art - mirrors framed in bark, fungus and seaweed; a trellis made of twigs - to bring the mundane into beautiful, celebratory life.
There is a name for people like her: woodlanders.
For the last six summers, small networks of folks who feel kinship with the trees and the earth have gathered for a few days around the country to share, swap and learn.
Not all who come to the Woodlanders Gatherings are artists, and few make a living at it. But the work produced by Fox and others - now on exhibit at the Crafts for Living Gallery in East Falls - offers a glimpse into the woodlanders' soul.
Grapevines are reborn as framework for a lamp. Weathered boards of spruce and pine form a music stand, with roots as feet. Whimsical "rock ladies" - created by Fox, 60, whose main job is landscape design - take shape out of stone, fabric, shells, algae and clay.
"See, they make you smile!" said Ellen Carver, who runs the gallery and founded its parent organization two years ago to bring together the region's disparate crafts communities.
She hopes the miniature stick chairs adorned with wasps' nests or the ottoman accented with elk antlers will pique visitors' curiosity - about the natural world, about craft, about what is possible with their own two hands.
"People just step on these things," Carver said. She picked up a lamp made of branches, marveling at its power to enlighten. "You look at nature differently."
John Tuton, a 64-year-old organizational consultant, grew up across the street from the Morris Arboretum and fell in love with the islands of coastal Maine before he was 30. Remote beaches envelop him in an uplifting, "highly energized peace." He has always lugged driftwood home.
But it was a course in making rustic furniture 10 years ago that transformed his relationship with the wild. Now he can tap or lick the end of a smooth, silvered pole to figure out what it was and might yet be.
A piece of spruce weathered by wind, for example, maybe "it's got a cutesy kind of curve to it. It might be an arm, might be a splat to a back, might just be decorative," he said, a chair taking form in his mind. "I'll put it in a pile and gaze at it for a couple of hours."
He doesn't want someone to just buy his furniture, either.
"I want them to feel that sucker," he said, to finger an arm, rub a leg, "to really get into things" on a visceral level, "kind of like when I'm out on the beach in Maine."
It's important, he added, that "something happened for them."
Linda Lou Horn understands such language, both as an artist and in her day job as a psychotherapist. She favors vines.
"They have all this natural energy and shape and form. I can't control them," she said.
So she follows their lines and wraps them in paper made by hand from the fiber of mulberry trees to create "vessels filled with light." Little clay feet make her lamps seem alive even with the switch turned off.
Horn, 59, experiences the Wissahickon Valley as "walking with my god." The vines, acorns, and bits of bark she finds are "gifts I've been given."
For Daniel Mack, who, like most of us, is used to being the central character in his life ("the father," "the builder"), being in the outdoors is to encounter "this kind of amazing theater of the animate world, and I'm only a walk-on."
The Woodlanders Gatherings are an immersion in that primal stage. Words don't quite convey the experience; hence the East Falls exhibit, titled Voices From the Woods.
The show is "kind of the scat of the Woodlanders," said Mack, choosing a phrase that, intentionally or not, serves to separate sunny-day nature-lovers from the real deal. "It's the way we can be identified."
Mack, 58, had been creating and teaching others how to make rustic furniture for years when he noticed that the shared off-hours at his workshops seemed to provide as much as the tools and techniques. The "gatherings" grew out of that discovery.
Part workshop, part ritual, they are a way to renew connections with the outdoors, to be awed by nature, to explore, and, for the artistically inclined, to express.
The exhibit is a "collection of those moments," Mack said from his home in Warwick, N.Y., site of this month's gathering. He believes Philadelphia may be ripe for one in the future.
"Everybody hears the voices in the woods. We are all woodlanders."