POWNAL — It’s summer and up in the woods behind Bradbury Mountain State Park those seemingly strange nonhuman presences that annually visit Hawk Ridge Farm are once again making an appearance.

The works of 20 regional sculptors, working in stone or steel, or both, have cropped up in the fields and are scattered along the woodland edges.

June LaCombe, sculpture curator and strong believer in the placement of art in nature, has done it again — mounted another sculpture show in such a way that most of the work seems to be rising from the farm itself, as though planted and coming into harvest.

The “Steel and Stone” exhibit features the work of Roy Patterson in stone and Stephen Porter in stainless steel. Of these two, as his medium implies, Patterson’s work is the most grounded in nature, while Porter’s reflects it.

No matter how abstract some of Patterson’s pieces seem to be, they are unmistakably human figures in the making, presences rising from stone. Those cut from rough granite reveal just enough clarity in their details to identify them as exactly that, life rising as though from geology rather than biology.

Whether pieced together from a half-dozen separate stones or carved from a single block, Patterson’s sculptures all seem to have that elemental life in them. And in his polished works, such as the beautiful black granite “Suzanna,” the human details remain abstract but absolutely identifiable.

If most of the works, as in Patterson’s case, seem to be rising directly from nature, the one most outstanding exception would be Porter’s strikingly modernistic “architectural” sculptures. They seem to have suddenly appeared in this beautiful  rural setting as though set down by some alien civilization.

Porter’s sculptures seem to take their environment in even as they mirror it back — erasing their separateness, their message in their mystery. The works are composed of radiant stainless steel, all of it expressed in the abstraction of geometrical forms (circles, cubes, obelisks, squares), some of them seemingly fluid, flowing in slow curves or sharp bends. They seem far from nature in their shapes  but brightly reflect their immediate environment. 

In one work, called “Totem,” a precariously stacked trio of cubes rests on a base that reflects the high grass around it so well that it’s almost invisible, creating the impression that the cubes above it are levitating, simply hanging in air.

Of the works by the 18 other sculptors, probably the most familiar to Maine people would be Wendy Klemperer’s widely exhibited “exoskeletal” rusty rebar animals, a horse rearing by the main gate, a snarling wolf farther down the stonewall. We not only see these two creatures, we also literally see their surroundings through them, much as Porter’s work reflects the life around it, and Patterson’s creates presence in stone.

And therein lies the message of this exhibit: Stone is earth, and steel is iron is stone. Light is light. Imagination is imagination, and all are part of that singularity we call nature. 

“Steel and Stone” may be viewed at LaCombe’s Hawk Ridge Farm through July 29, by appointment. Call 688-4468 or email jLaCombe@maine.rr.com. According to her website, www.juneLaCombesculpture.com, Hawk Ridge Farm will be open from 1 to 4 p.m., with no appointment, on July 15, 22 and 29.

Note: LaCombe will also present sculpture exhibits at Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in Boothbay, June 1-Sept. 30; and the Maine Audubon, 20 Gilsland Farm Road in Falmouth, July 3-Sept. 30.

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