About a 5 minute walk from my house is a small neighborhood park, a refuge for kids, dogs and the rest of us. A patch of old-growth forest, it has a path circling the periphery which gives you a good 20 minute stroll and leaves the interior protected, for deer, coyotes, kids’ forts and all. On balmy spring evenings at dusk the high schoolers or L&C students hang out with Today’s Herbal Choice – and the whole place pleasantly smells like those initials. But I digress.

A few years back a tiny wooden fairy house appeared, lovingly constructed and painted, with a house number and doors and windows that could be opened. Then another, and another, I think at its peak there were over 10 of them, parked under or affixed to the trees. Kids would bring little toys to decorate, and dogs would ignore those, if you were lucky. A walk in the wood was no longer boring for the young ones and everyone had a blast to spot new houses. Well, not everyone. There was a serious discussion in the neighborhood association about leaving nature to be nature and not make it a kitschy theme park, and that was that. Everything disappeared overnight.

This spring, a spark of defiance appeared at the bottom of the trees. Small painted stones can be found in locations close to the path, and for those of us walking there daily it has once again become either a bit of joy at the creativity of the young artists and our own sleuthing for new ones, or a source of dismay that there is yet again artificiality introduced into nature.

(Some of you might remember that I have argued along similar lines in an essay on Botanic Gardens, but here we are talking about a sort of playground (albeit a nature one) for families. https://www.orartswatch.org/art-among-the-plants-a-lament/)

The presence and fate of these stones might be under dispute – the way twigs have been affixed in what I am about to introduce next should not be controversial – it is simply ingenious.

Meet eyesasbigasplates – a duo of women photographers who do spectacular work with older people who participate in creating their “costumes” from materials found in their natural surroundings. They introduce themselves and their work here:

We are a Finnish-Norwegian artist duo Riitta Ikonen and Karoline Hjorth. Starting out as a play on characters from Nordic folklore, Eyes as Big as Plates has evolved into a continual search for modern human’s belonging to nature. The series is produced in collaboration with retired farmers, fishermen, zoologists, plumbers, opera singers, housewives, artists, academics and ninety year old parachutists. Since 2011 the artist duo has portrayed seniors in Norway, Finland, France, US, UK, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Sweden, Japan and Greenland. Each image in the series presents a solitary figure in a landscape, dressed in elements from surroundings that indicate neither time nor place. Here nature acts as both content and context: characters literally inhabit the landscape wearing sculptures they create in collaboration with the artists.

https://eyesasbigasplates.com

I adore everything about the idea (and admire the photographers’ technical skills as well – the images are of outstanding quality.) Collaborating with a group that usually falls by the wayside, making them active participants in their portraiture, using natural materials in such inventive fashion and creating portraits that simultaneously crystallize the person’s characteristic face and hint at something more fleetingly, almost magical – it’s just terrific. Why don’t I have ideas like that???? And why am I not the wisdom-radiating rhubarb lady??? All the portrait images are from this website: https://eyesasbigasplates.com/list-of-works/

A big shout out to T.L. who introduced me to this work.

Best fit for music today (magic in the forest!) happens to be one of my favorite operas of all times: Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen. Here is a Prague production from 1970, conducted by Bogumil Gregor.