Nature's Neglected Work Turned Into Art at Richmond Show

Craig Nakano, Chronicle Staff Writer   
Friday, August 28, 1998  
©1998 San Francisco Chronicle

For a group of artists premiering pieces at the Richmond Art Center, the best art isn't sculpted, painted or performed. It's found.

It's a slab of granite found in an old quarry in Los Banos. It's a plank of Douglas fir riddled with rusty nails found on a Humboldt County beach. It's a bramble-covered plot of land found in Napa, just waiting to be transformed into something beautiful.

The Corte Madera artists, whose collaborative goes by the name Meadowsweet Dairy after the converted cow barn and creamery they took over in 1991, spend six weeks every year scouring beaches and old quarries for natural items of beauty. Those pieces -- some as heavy as 12,000 pounds -- are hauled back to Marin County in their green Loadstar 1700 truck with a crane.

Throughout the rest of the year, at the dairy-turned-studio off Highway 101, the artists create with the intent of preserving -- not changing -- nature's works of art.

One piece is a striking, 7-foot stretch of redwood root, the surface sandblasted to reveal the beige and dark browns normally hidden underground.

Another piece is a charred chunk of redwood about the size of a small refrigerator with gaping hole in the middle, the victim of a forest fire. The redwood, almost completely covered with charcoal-looking scales, sits on a slab of Madera granite.
To some, the objects are discards, trash, rubble. But to the environmentally aware, they are masterpieces, Meadowsweet artists say.

"The way we work is not so much about creating as it is discovering and presenting,'' says Henry Corning, 54, who bought the Meadowsweet Dairy property and has overseen its transformation into an artists' studio. "This art is about not imitating anything.''

The group will open an interactive installation starting Wednesday at the Richmond Art Center. Meadowsweet artists will stack driftwood and other beach discards in the shape of walls, which local schoolchildren will be invited to dismantle. Then other community groups will come in to construct a different work using the same materials. The process of tearing down and rebuilding will be repeated over the course of two months.

Meadowsweet artist Sam Bower, 32, says the aim is to acknowledge nature as the source the art. "We are taking things that tend to be overlooked and exalting them,'' Bower says. "There is a sense that natural things have a beauty that far exceeds anything that can be created.''

Corning, Bower and assistant Glenda Griffith form the core of Meadowsweet Dairy. Others join their scavenging hunts, visit the studio or collaborate on site-specific projects, which comprise about half of Meadowsweet's work.

One site-specific project can be seen at the di Rosa Preserve, the former winery that became an extensive, eclectic art collection in Napa. The preserve had a decrepit boat sitting in a field littered with trash and overgrown with brambles and poison oak. Meadowsweet propped up the boat, cleared the field and planted Mexican feather grass that shifts with the wind in the same way waves roll in the ocean.

"Meadowsweet has combined art with nature in a very strong way,'' says Rene di Rosa, whose preserve features two other Meadowsweet projects. "They pay attention to nature, and they are creative.''

Some pieces are sanded, sawed, darkened with a blow torch or rubbed with linseed oil. But the best pieces, Corning says, are practically untouched. "The more you work on a piece,'' Corning says, "you are destroying the connection between it and the tree that it came from, the ground that it came from, the quarry it was split from.''

The artists' philosophy is enhanced by their unusual working environment. The Meadowsweet Dairy site originally was a quarry that produced fill for the construction of Highway 101. The dairy was built in 1926 and operated until 1942, when it was sold. The new owner converted the cow shed into a school and the creamery into homes for the faculty.

Today, a giant green silo sits in the front yard with a milk-bottle- shaped Meadowsweet sign and piles of gnarled tree limbs covered with moss, burned by fire or aged in the sun. The cost of recovering such items: the price of a permit from the Fish and Game Department or the Bureau of Land Management. In the case of the swirl pine, the permit was $12.50. After restoration and enhancement at Meadowsweet, pieces usually go for $600 to $11,000.

The artists' short-term goals include obtaining funding for a proposed project on the Farallon Islands, where abandoned Coast Guard buildings could be turned into bird habitat. One of their long-term goals is to spend more time on the road with their crane, scavenging for the perfect piece of natural art. "It's remarkable what you can do with levers and a little patience,'' Corning says.