Years ago, I wanted to put a tent over my design and artwork, and I called it Skyscraperforest.
What does the name mean? It attempts to recognize the duality of the two environments we immerse ourselves in. It’s perplexing and informative to find inspiration in overbuilt, human-intense urban environs and simultaneously in wild nature, where we want no humans to interrupt at all. There are two forests for me. I wanted to write words and make music about my human loves in our amazing, troubled cities. I wanted to make sculpture to honor the natural world — the absolute religion it gave me my entire life. Cities rupturing with garbage and rock and roll and people falling in and out of love, while just over the hill a waterfall plunges into a rock bowl it’s been carving out for a million years. I find both endlessly compelling.
As time goes by, the two begin to merge. The sculptures of the last few years were purely driftwood and forest scavengings, but suddenly I’m picking up clothes abandoned in the road and adding their shreds to wall pieces of burned wood and flowers. I had been so intent on making sculptures that were made of beautiful, natural objects before they even became a composition — this was my ongoing love letter to nature, and my shout for humanity to keep believing in the natural world for its spiritual value in our lives. (Cuz, holy shit, shouldn’t the part where a healthy environment keeps us alive and flourishing be obvious?)
I feel more desperate than ever to protect and worship the natural world, but maybe there are other visions that tell this story and make this point. New ideas start knocking on the cellar door, demanding their moment, demanding to be brought out into the light. Suddenly I see these sculptures take on a brushstroke of the apocalyptic waste of humans. The fire is in our face.
New works are panels and tapestries — layers of burned wood, bleached river wood, dried flowers, egg shells, clothing scraps, scrap electrical wire, and certainly more as the project evolves. In recent years I’ve watched wilderness burn — five-hundred-year-old trees flaring in the night, homes burning as effigies to human madness. The woods grow back sometimes, but the black trunks stay. The fire makes you look at it, long after it’s gone. You never stop saying its name.
Stay tuned for upcoming shows,
BB
Living Book of the River
ARTIST STATEMENT
The winter floods on the Russian River in Alexander Valley leave behind giant drifts of wood tangled together: broken branches, roots, and trunks that were upstream forests a moment ago. They grow fast, are swept away, and then sprout anew in a constant life cycle along the river. Sometimes they’re laid out like blankets on the gravel bar; other times they’re wrapped high up in the willow, walnut, and cottonwood trees that survived the flood.
I have always thought these flood-created tangles were beautiful. The more I observed them, the more I found inspiration and beauty in their individual pieces as well. I can remember marveling at these tangles and giant drifts my entire life, and in recent years, wondering how I could translate them into artwork.
Starting roughly a year ago, I began to gather this wild, broken tree and flood wreckage and give it new life in my own compositions.
A bleached piece of wood lying on the river rocks is a poem. Piecing many of them together in a new form is a story about a flood event, a season, a changed landscape — and hopefully it reinforces that every bit of the natural world is extraordinary and deserves reverence.
The first pieces I made were the more abstract wall sculptures: the Jellyfish, Kelp, Lungs. Making these got me thinking about my love of animal architecture. Here I was, putting sticks together, a bit like a bird building a nest. I have loved bowerbird nests since the first time I saw them. The nests and the lights for this show came from that spark — making something practical the way an animal might, when it has a pile of sticks at its disposal. I suppose I had always been looking for an excuse to make a human-scale nest; to point out how badass animals are while simultaneously looking for a new mating ritual.
If you take anything away from this show, I hope it is a renewed appreciation of nature. I mean this in a religious way and a practical way. Sitting still and observing — with all your senses — the movements of animals and the changing of the seasons has the spiritual value and depth to maintain in us full fucking joy. Practically, it feels as if we have given up on our hopes to save the environment, when nightmares we never even imagined suddenly crash into our lives. We should not abandon hope, though. Our children need clean air and clean water far more than they need money.
And in the very quiet midnight of our lives, when the worries come on that are difficult to turn off, to know that the creatures we share the planet with are going about their lives, without the disturbances and poisons of humans, will be a profound comfort.