HOLDEN – For printmaker and environmental artist Kris Sader, 53, of Orono, the Fields Pond Audubon Center in Holden with its wooded trails offered the perfect setting and inspiration for her site-specific work, “Raven and Pine Needle.” Her fine art prints also will be shown at the center during September and October.

In site-specific art, Sader said, “The artist uses a spot to say something, responds to it and lets the spot speak.”

In this instance, what spoke to Sader were pine needles and ravens.

“I walked the site and first I noticed how the pine needles fell on the ground and informed me of what was above,” she recalled. “I tend to let the site tell me what I’ll be doing. I let all my senses explore the spot.”

As she walked, Sader noticed the size of the pine needles, the pattern they made as they fell, how they caught in the branches and other plants growing under the evergreens, and how those “marks” were made “by other than a human hand.” That led her to think about how such things happen and she began to muse about the essence of “pine needle” and how it is a “vessel of its own.” Sader said she had been thinking about this art project for five years.

“One of my influences is Joseph Beuys, a European shaman, who coined the phrase, ‘the spirituality of matter,'” she said. “The emphasis is on the importance of nature to human beings, how we try to form a connection, how there is a sameness, a commonality to all things on Earth.” That connectedness is what Sader attempts to talk about in her art – and, she said, how we are in danger of losing that connection.

“We’re all carbon-based,” she said.

As she focused on “pine needle,” she stumbled on the stories of the Northwest Indian people, and the people of the Far East, northern Russia, China and Nepal, who shared mythologies of how a raven brought light to the world.

“In the story,” Sader said, “Raven changes into a pine needle.” Raven drops into the river just as a young woman is dipping her basket into the water. He is carried home to her grandfather who keeps a sphere of light in a treasure box. Raven steals the sphere and flies out into the world with the light.

Sader started work Sept. 1 on the 3-D on-site installation, but she booked her time there two years ago.

A crab apple orchard served as the site-specific vehicle for Sader’s earlier work, “Subconscious Petals,” begun in 2002 and finished in 2003. She suspended 15 cotton batiste and cotton organdy pieces of fabric from the branches of the crab apple trees.

The cloth “canopies” acted as collectors and “recorded natural events,” she explained – petal fall, pollination, insect activity, bird activity, light events such as fading, wind events such as tearing and fraying, and the smudgy gray tracks of air pollution. Those events left a variety of marks on the fabric.

The Fields Pond exhibit will include Sader’s “petal portraits,” prints made from flower petals.

“It was about the random patterns nature gives,” Sader said of “Subconscious Petals.” “I let the canopies [the fabric] do what they wanted to.” In that way she became “a partner with nature in making art.”

Sader will give a presentation about her art at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 28, at Fields Pond Audubon Center on Fields Pond Road. She has been a printmaker for seven years, working with nontoxic methods, which substitute less harmful substances, making etching safer for the artist and the environment.

To learn more about Sader’s art exhibit, call Fields Pond Audubon Center at 989-2591.