Landscape Shapes Mindscape

Resilient Forest Management Towards Creative Culture

How is your sense of self reflected in the landscape around you? How does your landscape shape your mindscape?

PROJECT PROPOSAL

We live in a time of meaning crisis, a time of increasingly disconnected culture from reverence and purpose. It's not only a felt sense growing within ourselves, but a glaring reality in the landscapes around us.

Landscape Shapes Mindscape is a large-scale sculpture being built in the woods out of materials gathered from forest tending. It is part of an experiment exploring ways that we can interweave stewardship and art to cultivate deeper meaning and connection with our local community, ourselves, & our ecologies of place.

This experiment is intended to bridge the gap between tending the forest and the creative act. It is aimed at finding new motivations for relating to our landscape with more than just an obligatory tending, but an opportunity to create meaningful experiences and explore the mythic connections to this relationship: turning forest management into art and ritual.

Through this project we hope to inspire the threads of weaving our community into a more resilient future. The sculpture will remain throughout the year as a touchstone and gathering landmark for continued creativity through forest stewardship. It will be open to creative additions by anyone participating in our social forestry series throughout 2024 and 2025.

In the final autumnal part of this creation, we will burn and compost the sculpture, reflecting the cyclical process of returning the energies to the soil and the underworld, completing the symbolic arc to the mythos of the project.

We will be hosting a 3-part Social Forestry series alongside the sculpture site. The series is an effort to restore health to an overgrown forest which was historically logged and repair a relationship between the community and land through a hopeful ongoing tending of place, investment in local culture, and our shared knowledge.

MAKE: Dead and overgrown woody debris from local forest, waste off-cuts from local lumber mills, wood and paper lanterns, woven willow basket nests, rope, hardware

DIMENSIONS: Approx. 25 ft tall x 15 ft wide

TEAM: 8 core crew

SCULPTURE TIMELINE

Site prep and material collection: April 15th - May 1st 2024
Construction: May 1st 2024 - June 21st 2025
Burn Ritual: winter of 2025

"To address our eco-grief and live in harmony with our surroundings, we need to re-skill, always remembering those who came before us and acting in ways that honor traditional wisdom of people and place."

Tomi Hazel Vaarde, author of Social Forestry

Social Forestry Series

This project has planned a 3 part series to engage the local community in building our understanding of these forestry concepts while creating stronger community culture through the ethics of tending our forest together. The intention of this series is to initiate community engagement as an ongoing monthly workshop, hosting new collaborators and guest practitioners when possible.

Relationship Building

Discussions on social forestry concepts and practices, hands on fuel load reduction, non-power tool work for enabling deep listening, conversation around invasive biology

Site-specific Check Dams

Felling selective trees, considering overall forest health aimed towards old growth, tool skilling, processing down biomass, building check dams on contour for landscape water retention

Burnpiles and Biochar

Gathering excess woody debris, location and preparation for burn piles, biochar kiln conceptualization and construction, biochar process and resource allocation, discussion about tera pretta

Place

This project is located on ancestral homeland of the Southern Pomo, Kashaya Pomo, & Coast Miwok peoples, known currently by most as Sonoma County, Ca. This area is part of the Russian River watershed, with Green Valley Creek headwaters running from the lower valley where native salmon have been returning in recent years with restoration efforts.

David W. Orr, author of Ecological Literacy

"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."

CORE PROJECT PRINCIPLES

1. 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).

2. Waste–stream Resource Priority:

Wherever possible, we will prioritize use of “waste streams”, local donations, and tool library resources.

3. 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.

4.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.

PROJECT CREATORS

While there are many influences, people , and knowledge and wisdom ways that are contributing to the emergence of this project, it is being coordinated and led through the collaboration of Cristina Valverde and Cory Brown. You can find out more about Cristina's other work with bringing beaver back to California here: Beaver Taught Salmon

Make a donation

Thank you for supporting our project! Your contributions go towards the completion of this project, covering material expense and feeding our team members to build for free.

Frequency

One time

Monthly