Vision
"Knowledge of a place - where you are and where you come from - is intertwined with knowledge of who you are. Landscape, in other words, shapes mindscape."
David W. Orr - Author of Ecological Literacy
VISION
"Knowledge of a place - where you are and where you come from - is intertwined with knowledge of who you are. Landscape, in other words, shapes mindscape."
David W. Orr - Author of Ecological Literacy
How It All Started
We live in the forest just above the sculpture, and that forest is thick: weedy Doug fir and bay, growing tight after a century of milling. If a fire comes through, our home is toast, and so are our neighbors'.
Doing the forest work that needs to be done is a huge lift, and the funding for it keeps drying up. So we asked ourselves: what if tending the forest gave us the material to make art? Everything we cleared became the sculpture.
We love Burning Man and the temple burn, and we feel the disconnect there too, from the Home Depot lumber to art built far from where its materials grow. Mindscape is our answer: art made from this land, burned on this land, by the people who live around it.
There's grief in this too. A lot of us feel like orphans of our culture, without shared stories or rituals for loss. What we do share is this land, and loving a place in fire country means accepting we could lose it, so Mindscape is also a way to practice letting go, together.
WHY THIS? WHY A GIANT HEAD
The human face is quite possibly the most emotionally relatable image we can look at. Our brains have multiple dedicated areas specific to recognizing and processing faces...
What feelings will arise when you stand in front of this 20-foot tall face emerging from the earth?
What kind of connection will you find in this reflection made of materials from forest tending?
What kind of story will we discover together watching something so beautiful set ablaze in a mythically symbolic way?
About US
Co-led by Cristina Valverde and Cory Brown, this project has been and continues to be an evolving team effort.
Cristina is a mixed-medium artist, wellness practitioner, and co-creator whose life and works explore the interweavings of ecological interdependence, animism, consciousness, living life as art, and art as medicine.
Cory is a designer, builder, and artist, drawing inspiration from wild mountains, craft oriented cultures, artful function, existential meanderings, and the void from where it all comes.
OUR TEAM
We couldn't do this without the volunteer efforts of our evolving team. Thank you so much to all who have put their time and energy towards this! Some of the pivotal members of this team have been:
Emmett Brennan
Luis Gonzalez
Gwenna Mckee
Ryath Beauchene
Colby Accacian
Kyla Vangelder
Hunter Franks
Creation Process
While the finished result may vary from the concept sketches, these have been instrumental in helping us know where to start.
The skeleton for the head is constructed from excess or overcrowded timber in our forest. The surfacing is a mixture of thin offcuts from local lumber mills and dead branch debris from the forest. The thin offcuts allow us to bend and create some of the complex curved surfaces of a human face. The branch debris will be added as a second layer to create detail and connect the visual of our overgrown forest.
Guiding Principles For Build
01 Regenerative Forest Stewardship Practices
The project will enlist practices informed by traditional ecological forestry perspectives, while providing a platform for participants for discussion and learning about our local place(s).
02 Waste–stream Resource Priority
Wherever possible, we will prioritize use of “waste streams”, local donations, and tool library resources.
03 Zero or Positive Impact
Each step of the project will assess its impact, aiming to achieve an outcome with no consequence or a positive socio-environmental impact before being enacted.
04 Collaborative Creativity Towards Meaningful Culture
Engaging the creative act together we aim to cultivate deeper meaning in our local culture through shared experience and values.