WOOD: material, object, environment and idea

Excited to be a part of this beautiful exhibition in Southern Vermont.

Wood: material, object, environment and idea

Stream Chapter 8
August 22^nd & 23^rd 2026, 12-5 PM
South Windham, Vermont

The open field at Old Cheney & Kibby Camp Road, just before the small bridge over the stream

From the announcement:

After a hiatus of two years, Stream Chapter 8 returns to its original site, a stream coursing through field and forest near South Windham, Vermont. Honoring the site, Stream Chapter 8 will explore wood as material, object, environment and idea. The exhibition is scheduled to take place on the weekend of August 22nd and 23rd, 2026.

The surrounding Vermont forest where the stream is located is a changeable landscape–a site perceived as part of a natural environment, but one that has hardly been untouched by humans. This becomes evident when walking off the trail; one encounters stone walls that enclosed farmer’s fields in the18th and 19th centuries as European settlements sought agricultural dominion over the landscape. We are struck by what art historian Adrian Stokes calls a “realization of the past-living-in-the-present.” These human markers in the forest landscape where the stream is situated serve to “keep us in touch with our own development” according to Stokes, since “geological time is out of scale with our own weathering, unlike traces of culture.”

By considering different ways to think about the meaning of the word wood, we are forced to wrestle with the specific vs the general. Writer Rebecca Solnit notes that the “specific invariably complicates the general,” and we’ll see some works in this exhibition delicately balance this opposition, while others prompt close focus on minute details or on the other end, engage the viewer in an open-ended reflection upon the boundlessness of indeterminate forms.