Wastelands + Beauty

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WASTELANDS + BEAUTY It is conventionally held that the beautiful and the wasted belong to mutually exclusive categories.

Yet, they share a key distinction: both categories are plastic. Attempts to define them prove elusive. Sometimes, the unstable boundaries of these antipodal categories overlap, creating a paradox: a landscape, object, or thing that attracts and repels, can be beautiful and can be waste. Landscapes that hold these dual qualities in suspense are characteristic of the sublime.

This summer’s Overlook Field School embraces the complexity of waste and beauty and explores the interstices between each.

- Parker Sutton and Katherine Jenkins

Resident Artist Instructors: Katherine Jenkins Parker Sutton Overlook Field School Program Manager Liska Chan

All photographs, unless otherwise noted, are by Parker Sutton and Katherine Jenkins

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[COAL SHADOW]

Tori Murphy | steel rods & rock Coal Shadow is inspired by abandoned coal refuse sites, also known as slag heaps, which are pervasive throughout Pennsylvania. Coal refuse is the byproduct of coal mining and consists of rocks that have less than five-percent coal, which makes them non-cost-effective to burn.

A slag heap landscape is similar to mounds of black volcanic rock. The rock materials are displaced from their subterranean origins making them appear unearthly. Imagine acres and acres of heaping black rock with small shrubs and birch trees attempting to reclaim the land. The impressive rolling heaps influenced the form and effect of the sculpture.

The rocks are layered with anthracite which yields the shiny smooth texture. The light changing throughout the day reveals the shimmering surfaces that the coal company targeted. These heaps exist as a result of exploiting nonrenewable resources and a disregard for mitigating the byproduct. This sculpture aims to simultaneously evoke the affects of coal extraction on earth and the beauty of the slag heap landscape.

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[WORK]

Flora Chen | concrete, coal rocks, powdered charcoal, and AMD pigments Inspired by the Lackawanna Coal Mine and Isamu Noguchi, Work embodies the physical labor that was put into the coal-mining operation. Coal rocks were buried into a concrete cast, revealed by carving and sanding. The columns were finished with powdered charcoal and pigments from the acid mine drainage. The relationship between burying and revealing, construction and art, as well as beauty and ugliness was challenged throughout the making process.

Segments of the columns were arranged diagonally and nestled along the edge of a woodland and meadow. Work engages viewers’ awareness of the space as their perspective of the installation changes. Balanced only by gravity, segments will fall, wear, and evolve over time much-like our ever-changing, unstable landscape.

Despite being a site-specific installation scale, Work attempts to “artfully” address the “ugly” past of the coal industry that negatively impacted the social and ecological health of a regional landscape.

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[THE BOREHOLE]

Emma Stone | muslin, welding curtain, PVC piping, steel rods The Borehole is inspired by works by Michelle Stuart and Robert Irwin, which play with translucency, room creation and light. The orange curtain is reminiscent of iron oxide carried from the coal mines, through the bore holes before depositing on the bed of the Lackawanna River. It invites the viewer in to see the landscape with a new perspective. The woodland clearing is framed by gaps in the fabric, through the orange screen and finally up to the sky.

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[WE’RE ALL COAL MINERS, YOU JUST GOTTA GET INTO THE GROUND] Ben Lucke | plaster of paris

This piece alludes to the process and violence of resource extraction and the creation of slag heaps. It speaks of decay and entropy as solid plaster blocks crack and crumble into bits and pieces. This violent breaking transforms the pristine and untouched into something entirely unrecognizable and ultimately unnatural.

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[THE SPACE BETWEEN]

Chris Weaver | felled maple branch, corten steel plates, coal dust The Space Between employs the archetypal symbolism of trees to challenge perceptions of waste and beauty. On approaching the piece, one encounters what first appears to be a small tree in a forest clearing. Closer inspection reveals the tree is actually suspended above the forest floor, straight and centered over a square depression in the ground. The outer branching of the tree is living, with green foliage still attached. Yet toward the base of the trunk, the natural surface gives way to carved patterns in the wood. The end is raw and splintered, evidence of the violent act that created the suspended form. Below, a shallow pit with a square steel rim is partially filled with coal dust that has been neatly raked and leveled. A six inch gap between the tree and the coal pit affects a schism of the juxtaposed forms and the concepts they imply.

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Photo by Chris Weaver

FULL SIZE PORTRAIT PHOTO CHRIS

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[WHEN COAL WAS KING]

Megan Little | wood, muslin, acrylic, plaster The legacy of coal mining bleeds through Northeastern Pennsylvania. It can be traced through the fluorescent orange veins of the Susquehanna River, the seemingly endless tunnels nested beneath the ground, and the transposed slag piles that speak to those voids. We also see it in the people and the stories of those whom have been isolated within this wastelands of the Anthracite Coal Region.

“When Coal was King” visualizes this binding between coal, people, and landscape. A piece of anthracite cast on a plaster pedestal is situated below a tensile frame, establishing a room within the woods. As the sun moves overhead, the orange oculus illuminates not only the pedestal, but our obsessive glorification of coal. By tethering the structure to the trees, the fragility and temporality of the room mimics the instability of a coal mine. Surface and subsurface become planes within the space, experienced through layers of materiality that allude to the structure of a coal mine. Viewers are asked to enter the space, to experience the closeness, and to reflect on Pennsylvania’s once booming coal industry.

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[RELICS OF A FORGOTTEN PAST] Beau Black | birch wood, matte white spray paint, skull, glass jars, stove tops, window, spray can and native mosses Relics of a Forgotten Past revolves around the perception of discovery and hidden beauty. My intent was to arrange a collection of “relics” that had been forgotten throughout the Overlook property, and bring them back to a realm of admiration and beauty. These relics included old stove tops, a spray paint can, glass jars, a window frame and a skull.

At one point in time these objects were an essential tool, or an important piece in someone’s or something’s life, but had since been forgotten. I discovered them half buried beneath soil and hidden under the dense ferns of the forest. I displayed these relics on a bed of moss which I collected from the context in which they were found, and painted them white to obscure their materiality. The relics were found but their story was missing. I used this concept to curate a new story. All of these miscellaneous relics were displayed in close proximity to one another and individually placed within a shallow “grave”. They were brought back from the unknown and celebrated for their once forgotten beauty. Each relic was admired one last time, and as time passes the graves might fill in with soil, leaves and other natural debris so that they would returning to a similar state in which I discovered them.

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[FILTERS]

Katya Reyna | muslin, voile, welding curtain, steel rods, AMD pigment Filters was inspired by the convergence of the bright orange oxide and the clear river water at the borehole in Old Forge.

Robert Irwin wrote there is no separation between object and its environment - that they are completely interlocking. In this case, the panels have absorbed the landscape. Through exploration of use of screens and light to create rooms, the scrims filter the view through a spectrum of color and light. There are moments of distortion and clarity as one moves through the panels or rooms, looking backwards and forward. The final panel, however, provides a true confluence or overlapping of conditions that are no longer mutually exclusive - orange/clear; disturbed/pristine; waste/beauty.

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[UNSTABLE]

Eden Haskins-Dahl | acrylic paint, silver mylar, plywood “Unstable” is inspired by the Lackawanna Coal Mine and the work of Richard Serra. Historically, coal mining is an industry of unstable working conditions and unstable job security that has left both people and the environment in a state of vulnerability.

Pennsylvania is home to streams stained bright orange by acid mine drainage and land blackened by mountains of mining byproducts; these sites illustrate the distinct mark of disturbance that coal mining has left on the landscape. This installation tells the story of an industry’s impacts, which initially lay hidden underground are now visible on the surface.

The posts have one black side and one reflective side, representing the relationship between coal mining and the local environments. The black symbolizes the coal mines, while the reflective side, which captures light and color from the surrounding meadow, symbolizes the affected landscapes. The slender posts make a delicate structure that is meant to evoke a feeling of instability, as if the structure could come down at any moment.

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Fuller Center for Productive Landscapes Department of Landscape Architecture University of Oregon landarch.uoregon.edu blogs.uoregon.edu/fullercenter 2017