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Art & Ecology


Art & Ecology:

Perspectives and Issues



Ecological Design

Barbara Westfall, Gathering Places

by Don Krug

Barbara Westfall resides in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, where she lives on a small working farm with her husband and son. Westfall is in the process of restoring sections of her family farmland to native prairie by planting indigenous grasses, such as, baby and big blue stem, species of wild flowers and other flora. She received her MFA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1993. Gathering Places and Daylighting the Woods are two works which highlight Westfall's ecological art interests, centered around issues of restoration, ecofeminism, and community action.

Beginning in 1991, Westfall spent several years creating Gathering Places. The artist had always felt a deep connection to her family and their past agricultural practices. Her grandmother and grandfather immigrated to the United States from Poland at the turn of the century. They sustained their way of living through deep connections with the land. These connections with nature and culture were passed on to Westfall as she grew up in a rural setting. Westfall explored this family interdependency and ecological linkage between art and life, through Gathering Places.

Gathering Places was the beginning of a prairie restoration project on Westfall's family farm. Westfall conceived of the art work as a living tribute to ecological design and sustainability. The artist decided to live her philosophy by creating a visual and non-visual sense of place on her farm. She enacted her art daily, creating a space for friends and visitors to gather and share stories of cheer, community, and ecological concerns. For Westfall, gathering place represents a community-based, ecologically healthy and sustainable land-based way of living. Westfall used her art to demonstrate that art, ecology, and culture are interconnected. Westfall views her sense of place as a way to establish a broader working relationship with her community, to share food, resources, and to barter for other services. Through these daily routines and artistic endeavors, Westfall actively attempts to address community ecological needs and issues.

In the fall of 1993, an exhibition was held of the work that had been completed up to that point to celebrate with community members and the public. Time is a critical concept in Westfall's work. It is conceived of as on-going and in relationship to seasonal changes. Gathering Places embraced living processes over product. The exhibition was understood as a placemarker that recorded life-centered events in a series of other lived experiences. It was a moment in time viewed as continuous and circular, not just a time to admire an artistic product.

To mark this occasion, people were invited to visit an exhibition at the artist's farm. They walked a path that stretched across the open prairie into a small wooded section of land, and along a gently flowing creek. Along the pathway the artist had accented restored flora. She marked the sections with text to inform the visitors of her artistic endeavors. Small shelters were also erected from materials at the site for people wishing to sit a while and directly experience of nature. At the end of the path was a barn that served as an exhibition center with organized displays about local and state laws the artist had to contend with in order to accomplish her daily ecological art activities. These legal papers and letters were sewn together as a quilt, signifying the need for greater understanding of issues through community dialogue and open public forums of communication. Quilting bees in the past often served as gathering places of community conversation.

The day-long exhibition culminated in an evening performance. Westfall buried a loaf of bread in her garden, a gesture of thanks for a year's bountiful harvest. The bread was made with grain produced from her farm. Later, people participated in jumping the fire, a ritual enacted to symbolize the passing and regeneration of new life for the coming year. Some community members and visitors stayed the whole day, and some people spent only a few hours. However, those who attended will probably remember the artist's exhibition as a celebration linking art, aesthetics, ecology, and culture.

In 1992, Westfall worked with the University of Wisconsin Arboretum system to raise public awareness about seasonal changes that influence the maintenance of prairie landscape across the midwest. Time was one of the major concepts that Westfall explored as she collaborated with Arboretum personnel. Each year the University staff girdle young aspen that begin to intrude into the open prairie grasses and foliage. The girdling process is used by the staff to kill the aspen. It is believed that the girdling process replicates the natural cycles of woodland growth and decay.

In Westfall's project titled, Daylighting the Woods, she spent a year highlighting the act of girdling young aspen and burning open prairie. She stripped the trees' bark in sections approximately five feet from the ground and sanded their surfaces over a period of six months. Natural oils were used to draw attention to the human manipulation of stripping bark from the aspens to slowly kill the young trees. Later, controlled burning was used to stimulate new growth. Photographs were taken to document her working processes over the year and the photographs were exhibited during a performance designed to educate visitors at the arboretum about the effects of human intervention within natural ecological systems.

Westfall's work has been exhibited through the documentation of her performances at several galleries and sites including the Madison Art Center and The University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum. She frequently works across disciplines and with other artists, such as Renee Miller. Miller and Westfall are two of many regional artists whose art is strongly based in ecological design education and a connective aesthetic orientation.

Questions

Resources

A video of Gathering Places can be obtained from the artist by writing to:
Barbara Westfall
3246 Valley Spring Rd.
Mt. Horeb, WI 53572










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