MacLeish QR

Zebra Trees and Boundary Lines: Hope Springs Imaginal

An Arts Afield Project

MacLeish Field Station, Smith College

Zebra Trees and Boundary Lines: Hope Springs Imaginal

*note: maybe tell the story a little bit, or acquainting with the forest? Include process photos?

Zebra Trees and Boundary Lines: Hope Springs Imaginal grew out of a relationship between Leduc and a decomposing birch in Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in 2021. Three years later, Leduc encountered a rhyming “Zebra Tree” at MacLeish Field Station and has since witnessed the falling and ongoing decomposition of Zebra Trees across geographic designations. As the trees alter their states, they mentor Leduc with measured wisdom regarding scales of reliability, experiences of liminality, and black-and-white, linear constructs.

Visitors are welcome to embody a state of liminal dynamism by walking on the logs, a fractal of the piece’s orientation along the crest of two watersheds (and that of all living entities). Framed, plein air artifacts of the artist’s acquaintance with four MacLeish sites reach out and up from the logs physically and energetically. Their color, gesture, transparency, and reflection represent—and invite others into—playful moments of porosity and participation with and as an ever-expanding, relational whole.

FIELD MARKS: PROCESS + INVITATION

The four 2D artifacts in Zebra Trees and Boundary Lines follow suit with what I refer to in my practice as Field Marks:

We move through life riding waves of transitions. Infinitely scalable gradients that exist across dimensions, they blend and blur: sidewalk<-->park, Spring<-->Summer, literal<-->imaginal, subjective<-->objective. In my art practice, I refer to the forging and deepening of relationship as a “process of acquaintance.” In doing so, I acquaint myself with endless transitions. It is a process that requires zooming in, deep listening, and agile communication. As I acquaint, I participate. In doing so, I, too, become porous: dexterous and continuous.

Field Marks both exemplify and encourage others to practice this process of acquaintance. To create them, I first collect “visual data” by having a push/pull experience—a dialogue—by applying paint, marker, vinyl, and other art materials on a clear acrylic surface. As I peer at the environment beyond, I determine aspects of the site I want to emphasize, counter, or let be. Because each bit of data collection is a one-off, the stakes are high and I feel vulnerable. But because each piece is immediate and imperfect, the stakes are also low and I feel playful. This invested improvisation encapsulates the dynamism, complexity, and intimacy that arises from each site’s familiar yet idiosyncratic processes of acquaintance.

In the studio, I continue the dialogue with each location, working with the data until it synthesizes into something that speaks to our experience and relationship. The resulting Field Marks are sandwiched between upcycled acrylic and installed at or near their origin sites, inviting visitors to engage with the artifact as well as the collaborating environment, experiencing firsthand the kind of active listening dialogue that blurs boundaries and reconnects relations.