| "Maple, Apple, Birch" 2001 • Burlington International Airport, Burlington, Vermont This permanent installation in the Burlington International Airport, a collaboration with Elizabeth Billings, is a visual integration of architectural and natural elements and poetry particular to the identity of Vermont. Commissioned by Burlington City Arts, the work is comprised of two large walls of woven and carved panels that cover over 100 linear feet of wall. The 38 sculpted wood panels form two entire walls. On one wall 40 feet in length, 14 large panels of carved wood and woven saplings create the patterning and rhythms of the northern forest. Some panels that remain quite dark with bark on are suggestive of certain places in the forest whereas other panels are quite light with bark removed that give the effect of light filtering through the trees. In addition large hand carved maple panels of a sapling forest give depth, presence, lightness and another dimension of the forest to the wall. On the other wall 60 feet in length, 24 panels create a continuous frieze of carved rock maple and woven veneer. The panels of woven veneer are printed with Harriet Warren Vail's diary from the 1800s and contemporary poems by Cora Brooks that describe essential elements of time, weather and seasons that form the Vermont landscape. The carved maple panels depict momentary and seasonal changes of apple trees. Together the poetry, the diary notation and carved wood encompass the cycle of the Vermont landscape, season to season, and year to year. Standing in the Airport, waiting arriving or departing, it is possible to read briefly one panel to gain the overall effect of Vermont or to spend considerable time with the work gaining a true sense of the land, trees, terrain, the sense of sky past and present in Vermont. |
  
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