Sunday, June 28, 2009

Cory Ericson's garden




This cairn is a work-in-progress by Cory Ericson, who lives in Wendell, MA, up toward the New Hampshire border in high deep woods above the Connecticut River Valley. This last week Cory invited us to come out and see his place, after we admired this tower he's building in our friend Dara Wier's front yard out of flagstone and pieces of quartz he pulls out of the woods. There's a light inside, powered by a solar panel, and at night the quartz will glow with a soft, stone-filtered light.

The first thing I thought about at Cory's house and garden was his love for his materials, all found things, especially stones of great character and individuality. He has a profound connection to the mineral world, as Auden did, and he finds garnets, black tourmaline crystals, mica, beryl, schist. Those outbreaks of crystals seem like the thoughts of stones somehow, like outbreaks of energy. He also likes gnarled branches, old bottles, and pieces of metal from the ubiquitous old woodland dumps. He has a heap of rusty iron templates used to make shoes in many sizes; once this pile of scrap stamped out soles and heels, tongues and side-panels. Something strangely elegaic about that pile -- all that old metal meant to makes shelters for human feet.

In the garden Cory's stone walls rise to regular peaks, reminiscent of that famous French house the Surrealists loved by the Postman Chevalier, and more cairns with lights inside. He works unexpected transformations on trees: there are slim maples lashed together into arches, of various sizes. On some trees the slender branches are woven horizontally, sometimes making an arc from one tree to the next. The most amazing of these works is a solitary apple tree whose branches have all been woven horizontally and back in toward the trunk, making the tree into a kind of big complex upswept basket with leaves. It's gnarly and beautiful, and might be something from the garden of a baroque Italian villa.

All Cory's work has a meditative quality about it, the natural and the discarded shaped into objects that are painstakingly assembled, more than a little obsessive, probably impermanent, memorable things with a little loneliness and ache about them, but also with an exuberant flourish, like those crystals in their plain rocks.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Reminds me of the beehive cells you get on the Skellig Miceal, off Kerry's coast. All made from stone, inside they have these lovely corballed rooves, where the stones come in row by row until they shut out the sky. They're lovely and cool in the summer.

Unknown said...

Sounds wonderful, especially as described by you.

It may be a superficial comparison but I'm happily reminded of Andy Goldsworthy's work and the film about Goldsworthy called "Rivers and Tides"—which you and Paul probably know about.

If not I think you'd both like it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBcdL8uO71E&feature=related

galincal said...

I agree that Cory and Andy Goldsworthy seem like artistic cousins.

I am also reminded of the "circus trees" that are now part of Gilroy Gardens theme park south of San Jose...more of an "attraction" than "art" but it sounds like there is a kinship.

http://www.gilroygardens.org/pdf/Tour-CircusTree.pdf

sonds said...

Oh! I believe there was one of these in the little garden across from the University Club at UMass! I wasn't sure of its origin, and it was lacking quartz, but I remember being nervous about approaching it, because it appeared as if it were a giant bee hive...

I am glad it was not dangerous.

-Sondra