Sculptures in natural
settings enhance both

 POWNAL —  Minot Road is a friendly little dirt track that rises off Route 9 right next to Bradbury Mountain State Park. Follow it up its gentle slope for the half-mile that will take you right to its very end, and you’ll have arrived at Hawk Ridge Farm. Pull over to the side up there and look around. You’ll take a lot in that way before you even get out of the car. Woods on your immediate right, with a trail leading into them. Just ahead on your left is a beautiful country house with a row of magnificent maples over its driveway. A stone wall runs past you down the road toward it, and just over the wall a large slightly rolling field spreads out wide toward the woods on the little hill behind it. You can see a barn up there beyond the house and two white horses idling in the field in front of it. Closer to you, just beyond the wall runs another wall, off a bit at an angle separating the yard from the lower field, its length covered in a full and wondrous grapevine that arches beautifully over its little gate. It’s early October—here and there the leaves have begun their change of colors, and you know that most of the local farms are already finishing up their harvests.

You climb out of your car, stretch, and begin to take a closer look around. Along that wall down toward the house you see a very large raven, wings outstretched, gliding beautifully toward the yard — but that glide is without movement — totally suspended right there, in mid-air, about four feet above the ground. You turn your head a bit the other way and see a very large elk walking in the lower field—“walking” but not moving. And browner, in a strange way, than you think an elk should be—rust brown, in fact, and though the shape of the elk is all there just as it should be—hooves, legs, torso, tail, neck with a a little trace of a mane, head, antlers —its body the perfect shape of its breed. But you can see through it—it’s insides nonexistent, hollow— almost ghostly—filled with nothing but air and whatever your vision perceives within and beyond it. The feel of third dimension cupping fourth dimension. And now, up above the fence behind it, where the field starts its higher rise toward the woods, you see three horses—a mare, stallion, and foal—all of the same steel complexity as the elk. All perfectly shaped to their breed—if their breed had been shaped from steel. All perfectly attuned to the beauty of this environment.—But—like that elk—all empty within the framework of their bodies

The produce of most farms is either vegetable or animal—or both. The produce of Hawk Ridge Farm is sculpture. But the produce of all farms rises from nature—from the human development of agriculture in the first, and here from the development of art through human nature working the products of the natural elements into a higher human purpose.

A genius for siting

It can never be stressed enough that human nature is risen from—and part of—greater Nature itself.—And June Lacombe, who owns Hawk Ridge Farm, is more than well aware of that. You could almost say she lives it.—She has worked here—and elsewhere—for decades, developing, placing, curating, and selling sculpture, and in doing so has taken on, you might say,  the mission of placing art in nature and compounding its beauty by doing so. She has a definite genius for the siting of these works, as has been more than evident here throughout the years she has worked this farm. Surprise is a great element in that genius—in all the space here—front yard, patio, backyard, upper and lower fields, and especially along the woodland trail, no space is neglected and no element misplaced. There are sixty pieces in this show that are placed outside to fit into the nature of this place, and forty more inside the house that reflect that nature. The discoveries made by visitors wandering here can’t help but bring out depth, surprise, understanding, and appreciation in each of their minds.

You’ll often find works placed here where you wouldn’t expect them, and sometimes you may even miss them—especially on the woodland trail—until the discovery is made in the placement guide for every item here that you’re given from the opening table.  On that opening table you’ll find the first sculpture in this show — Roy Patterson’s five-piece granite “Nocturne” — one of six works he has here this time (four of which you passed on the way up to that elk). His sculpture has appeared here in every exhibit that I can remember, including at least one in which he was one of the two major artists presented.

But now—back to your wanderings through the ways here. Down on the inside of that stone wall, near where you walked into the driveway, you will find a woman lying on the ground. She looks like stone. She is. Granite. “Landscape” by Cabot Lyford, another artist with much work here, both past and present. Most of her body is clearly visible but her head and feet remain as they were when they rose from the quarry. She has risen from rock, and in that the sculptor is trying to tell you something—something, perhaps, about creation itself. Most of the work of most of the artists that have ever appeared here has been to some degree abstract. From that rises wonder; from wonder rises thought — and any wanderer here will do a lot of wondering and thinking.

Wendy Klemperer’s horses

And with that in mind I take you back to the elk and horses. Not those white “real” horses up by the barn, but the steel horses and the elk fashioned by Wendy Klemperer, who has eight works here this time, and who is one of the most widely known Maine sculptors —chiefly for her works in weathered steel, and especially for those assembled from rebar —those slender steel bars used in construction to reinforce concrete structures. Her work with them looks to me a bit like drawing—lines formed to outline her figures. But these “lines” work in third-dimension, curving through the air and “building”—literally—the animal form intended. The crafting of these works must take incredible time and effort. And we’ll see more of her work as we go up the woodland trail/.

At the opening of that trail we are greeted by “Woman With Bird,” a short rounded statue with a distinctly Native American face carved in granite by Lise Becu, an artist with a French Canadian and Micmac heritage whose work also appears here often. We’ll see more of her along the trail. The next work here that appealed to me was Lin Lisberger’s wood and steel “Trapeez Ladder” dangling between two very young and slender oaks. It looked like a little ladder made by kids from crooked saplings and hanging just below an invisible treehouse.

So much, but not all

Then, moving on, Anne Alexander’s “Mighty Acorn” about two feet long and wide, looking to be just what it said it was and carved, appropriately, from oak. A few yards after that you’ll see Sharon Townsend’s “Offering,” a large red terra cotta bowl lying on its side with spilled offerings that look a bit as though they were carved from antler or bone. A short walk beyond that were Dan Dowd’s shining galvanized steel “Pine Cones” of various large sizes—up to about three feet—all but one lying here and there on the ground—that one hanging from a tree. Because the colors and shapes of so many of the things that called to me here blended in with the woods and carried that feeling with them, I almost missed Apte Reitzsch’s thin brown steel rod’s “New Leaf”—and then, likewise, almost missed Lise Becu’s “Rabbit”—again dark granite.—Football-sized and smoothly rounded, it sat on a small darkened stump right next to a much larger—and older—moss and lichen-covered stump with two holes under it—just large enough—I couldn’t help but notice—to be rabbit holes.

Farther down at the far curve of the trail are five more of Wendy Klemperer’s works—“Grazing Deer”, “Spotted Faun”, “Lumbering Stag”. “Howling Wolf”, and “Coyote”. But there is a basic difference between these and those up in the field: These are flat; one dimensional. Their maker calls them “shadows”. They have profiles but no depth; there’s no width to the bodies—but, like their progenitors, the lines and openings are there. And farther down the trail, she has something totally different from all her other work here—“antlers”—two pairs of them—large, curved, almost like caribou, lying on the forest floor but propped against a tree trunk, crafted from steel and resin, but carrying the very convincing color of antlers.

Many other works run down the rest of the trail’s loop—among them Meg Brown Payson’s “Stele 6,” Cabot Lyford’s “Rood,” Antje Roitzsch’s “Uprising,” Cat Schwenk’s “Earth Book II,” of cast bronze and granite representing an open volume lying on the forest floor, the drawing of single leaves on each of its two visible pages, and on from there Patrick Plourde’s “Vulture” of vintage steel parts, including a rising, crooked column of old pick heads on which the grim black bird is perched.

Now go back down to the farm itself. First look in the yard near the end of that grapevine- covered stone wall. There by the garden stands Thomas Berger’s granite, limestone, marble and bronze “Life in the Hive”—a very magnified stone version of a honeycomb on which three very large bees are working. Then go across to that little patio by the side of the house. Just above it you’ll see two granite chickens—Lisa Becu’s work again—perched in the shade of a line of shrubbery. Below them, down on the top of the patio wall you’ll see Roy Patterson’s granite “Balance;” Jesse Salisbury’s basalt “Guardian,”and down on the end Cabot Lyford’s limestone “Resting Figure.” A little table sits near that with John Wilkinson’s resin, cloth, fiberglass, paint and steel “Fifteen Men Standing.”

Stepping away from that you’ve turned the corner into the back yard, and there you’ll find—among others—Dan West’s “Yardbird,” a very tall heron fashioned from spruce driftwood; two large flat figures, “Baroque Elk” and “Swimming Elk”—more work by Wendy Klemperer—attached to the house wall; and two more Cabot Lyford pieces, “Emerging Figure” and, up under the pear tree, “Maelstrom”.

Now you’ve covered many—but far from all—of the outside works here. It’s time to go around to the front door and enter the gathering of works—forty of them—inside. Many are by the same sculptors whose work you’ve just seen, some are by others. Just go in and open to Wonder. You’ll find it.

This piece is by Jac Ouellette in powder coated steel. It moves in the wind and is sited along the 3/8 mile woodland trail as a part of the sculpture exhibition “Autumn at Hawk Ridge Farm.”

“Autumn at Hawk Ridge Farm,”  June LaCombe’s Hawk Ridge Farm 2016 Sculpture Exhibition; now open by appointment Sunday afternoons. Please contact at: [email protected],  207-688-4468.