WORDS TO WOOD/ WOOD TO WORDS
In an interactive collaboration, sculptor Susan Lyman and poet Alison Hawthorne Deming explore the plastic relationship between wood and words as the material of their artistic practice. They take their cue from John Fowles' The Tree: "the real subject of this arboreal excursion is not the trees at all, but the importance in art of the unpredictable, the unaccountable, the intuitive, the not discernibly useful." Trees here serve as found material, metaphor and means of being present.
THIS GROUND MADE OF TREES
. . . where everything is an invitation
to lie down in the moss for good
and become finally really
useful, to pull closed
the drapery of lichen
and let the night birds
call me home.
