Art in nature Artists return to the elements to create ephemeral sculptures at Montville arts center

Evergreen boughs bent to form a cavern, pine needles spread across the forest floor in the shape of a river, a medicine wheel laid out with rocks, maple saplings woven among the firs. These are some of the “natural” works of art unveiled at last weekend’s opening of the “Art in Nature” show at the Arts Center in Montville. All of the artwork incorporated materials found in nature and each were formed to express a specific theme.

For “Art in Nature,” artists ranging from Unity sculptor Gretchen Lucchesi to Portland stonecutter Zdeno Mayercak used nature as a gallery and their pieces are designed to blend with the brooks, waterfalls, ponds and woods surrounding the Arts Center in the Montville village of Kingdom on Route 3. The creations will remain on display throughout the summer.

When the Arts Center closes for the winter, the artwork will be abandoned to nature and will be slowly absorbed, by time and the elements, back into the landscape.

Internationally known artists from France, Ireland and across the United States earlier this month arrived in Kingdom to take part in its artist-in-residence program July 5-15. During the residency, each artist chose an outdoor location in the woods around Kingdom Falls and produced a sculptural piece “giving voice to the place.”

“What I like is the ephemerality of the pieces. They are there for a short period and then wither away gracefully,” Bernard Perroud, a native of France and a co-curator of “Art in Nature,” reflected.

Perroud has done public sculpture commissions in Texas, California and Germany. In Mexico, he collaborated with environmental architects Manuel Becerra and Jorge Ponce in several projects refurbishing public waterways and recreational areas. His work has been exhibited in France, Germany, California and the Canary Islands.

“I love how the artists get to integrate their works with nature and the public gets the imagination of the result,” Perroud said. “When you go into a gallery you see a finished product, here you come to a place where art is created among the elements around it. The public can understand what motivates the artist and the creative process.”

For his piece, Perroud was drawn to a wooded clearing with an oak tree at its center, flanked by two ancient pines. One pine was woven into a cavernlike structure of evergreen boughs, the other pine was left undisturbed. Two receptacles stand in front of the oak. One held water, the other glowing coals. The piece was meant to symbolize the elements of earth, water and fire.

Alan Crichton, director of the Arts Center and a co-curator of “Art in Nature,” said the show is the first of its kind in Maine. He said the artworks at Kingdom Falls differ greatly from the “earthworks” and “land art” that attracted worldwide attention in the 1970s and 1980s.

Crichton said many of those works were mammoth in size and left their mark on the land. He said the focus of “Art in Nature” is to create works with a lighter touch that give voice to a space through sculptural form.

“You can walk through nature and not see it,” he said. “The artworks here will draw people’s attention to the human aesthetic and connect them with more primitive concepts. We are trying to get things to reverberate with the feelings of ancient works within the same scale as nature.”

For the artist-in-residence program, Crichton said the Arts Center sought artists who had worked previously with natural elements and could walk through Kingdom and create works that respected the village’s natural environment. He said the intent was to draw attention to people’s place in nature, and the delicacy of that relationship.

Crichton said the show would provide people with an opportunity to commune with nature while viewing the pieces exhibited throughout the woods of Kingdom Falls..

“We have asked each artist to use what is here, to organize it and rearrange it,” Crichton said. “The pieces will last as long as they last. They will melt and wilt away over time and change their aspect as they do that.”

The Arts Center in Kingdom is off Route 3 in Montville. The show will be on view for the remainder of the summer. For more information, call 589-3025 or email: kingdomfallsart@hotmail.com. The Web site is: www.kingdomfallsart.org.