It’s the kind of forest Red Riding Hood might meet a wolf in, or through which Hansel and Gretel might leave a trail of breadcrumbs. They’re the kind of woods in which a German expressionist filmmaker might set an eerie tale of Dr. Caligari or Nosferatu. Like the massive boreal forests that grow to the north, at the edge of human existence, this a is a surreal forest that grows at the edge of our consciousness. Dreamlike—easy to dismiss as fantastic, but somehow beguiling and foreboding.
As you walk into Lydia Kann Nettler’s monochromatic forest, the sculptured trees stretch out, disappearing into the shadow beneath the boughs drawn on the murals that surround you. Instead of grooved bark, the texture of the trunks is represented by charcoal swirls and papier-mache limbs. A few fallen logs cross your path. Looking closer, rather than seeing moss, lichen or bugs, there are words—actual text—caught in the tree’s derma. Stories.
First Graft: Paper-Pulp-Prose is the latest incarnation of an installation that has been evolving over decades; it’s the first time Nettler has combined her visual art with elements of her writing. In some cases, there are bits of newsprint appearing on the tree trunks. Elsewhere there’s a sentence or a whole paragraph.
“Today I carry dead roses to the grave of my mother,” read the words tumbling down one tree. A grove of birch trees stands to one side, where the black flecks on the white bark are represented by lines of double-spaced prose.
“Tree to paper to story is a natural progression which, in this installation, comes full circle as the story is grafted back into the tree,” Nettler writes in her artist’s statement. She’s interested in how words can work as design elements, but also when reading can “create an environment of fantasy in the mind, just as the sculptural installation creates an environment in physical and visual reality.”
The pages of text on the trees are from her own collected short stories, none of which were composed to be part of her sculpture. Talking with the Valley Advocate last week, she explained the latest evolutionary step in her work: “I was building the trees with papier-mache and I was using newsprint, and I started leaving some of the text exposed. I liked how it looked, but then I went to a show by Leslie Dill. She does installations that include lines of poems from Emily Dickinson and Kafka, and I’d loved how she integrated the words. While I’d had the words in the newsprint appearing on my trees, I hadn’t thought of using the words to form some cohesive whole. Since I had all these stories I’d published or was trying to publish, I wondered what would happen if I tried to incorporate them in my art. I didn’t really know what would happen, which is why I called this exhibition First Graft.
“My stories are more about the nature of human beings,” she said, than the nature of trees. “They’re more about intense emotional subjects.” Since she is a practicing therapist, much of her writing and art explores psychological themes, but this is the first time she’s thought of combining them.
Elements of the project have been growing over decades, and have been presented in various incarnations over the years. More than two decades ago, Nettler started drawing charcoal sketches in a notebook while she was living in Kyoto. Her small vignettes of wooded scenes wouldn’t fit on the page, and she began experimenting with newsprint and expanding her vision to cover entire walls.
Sharing a studio with local sculptor Harriet Diamond, Nettler says, has helped inspire her to consider building her forests as dimensional spaces. On a number of occasions they’ve collaborated, with Diamond adding figures to her scenes, but in First Graft the viewer is the only figure standing in the prose grove.
First Graft: Paper—Pulp—Prose will be at the Oxbow Gallery Thursday, June 3 through Sunday, June 27. The gallery is open Thursday through Sunday ,12-5 p.m. A reception will be held Friday, June 11 from 5 to 8 p.m..