Lori Bradley

A perfect day at a hidden art park:

An unexpected exhibition at the Slocum’s River reserve turned out to be a beautiful and mysterious way to spend a perfect autumn day. It was slightly cold – just cold enough to keep us walking comfortably – with a little wind pushing the wispy clouds around in the sky. It was almost too perfect – the kind of day that makes you want to cry with memories and longings for something…hard to articulate.

We were surprised by a set of rustic stick ladders winding their way up to the perfectly blue sky. They look at the same time tough enough to climb but fragile and tentative. Perfect in a field of drying, decaying fall weeds and leaves smelling of damp grasses and salt marshes. From a distance they look tiny. Close up they are improbably tall – perhaps 30 or 40 feet high, but set sturdily in the ground.

The changing size perspective of the ladders left us disoriented, as did the next installation we happened upon – a group of beheaded and footless floating black coats – like stalkers in the forest. Perfect for this place. I come here seeking nature but always a little wary of whom or what might be hiding around the next corner. I always bring my dogs here as guardians, but a great help they’d be…I couldn’t get them to move past the floating coat sculpture for a half and hour. Finally, one ventured to sniff the bottom of one of the coats. I can’t blame them. The sculpture feels alive – figures drifting, floating waiting to grab you or run away in fear themselves.

Next we came upon a field of fish. Large terracotta salmon wind their way through drying flowers and milkweed. Like the coats, they feel alive. Again, we are disoriented a bit as standing in the river of clay salmon we feel like we are underwater – the blowing weeds look like seaweed moving in waves and we feel we are moving with the fish. I thought at first glance that the fish would be more interesting in the river down the hill – an estuary – immersed in the water at high tide and revealing themselves as the tide recedes…but no, the fish in the field are perfect.

These are my favorites. There are three others – a lovely pristine white chair – cut from metal but looking from a distance as if cut from pure white paper. Native American stylized symbols weave through the patterning of the chair, appropriate for this place of wild and tangled nature bordering on manicured farmland. My dog loves this sculpture. He’s pure white too and always sensitive to a good photo op!

We walk through winding trails of fields and woods by the river across the reserve. On a hill facing a herd of live cows is a massive metal rendition of a rotting cow carcass. Again, a little disconcerting in perspective and setting, but isn’t that what outdoor installations should do at their best? My dogs like the carcass and keep sniffing it – it looks so much like real bones in shadow – it should smell shouldn’t it?

We have to search to find the sixth and last sculpture hidden in a grove of cedar trees overlooking an old red farmhouse in the distance. It makes sense that this elevated object is a massive replica of an old pie crimper. What more appropriate for this old-timey sentimental point of view – a red farm house – bring to mind apple trees, country kitchens, gingham curtains, pies, pie crimpers? The odd, and again disconcerting, thing about the mega pie crimper is that it looks rather monstrous and sentimental at the same time. From a slightly different point of view it looks like a fossilized sea creature in a science museum – maybe a reference to the estuary on the other side of the cedars. I live in the city but the pie crimper reminds me of the attachment I have to rural American symbols – to the extent that I designed my own kitchen to have farm house atmosphere – red walls, white wicker, patterned old-fashioned curtains. Perhaps this rural-longing is embedded in all of us. I like this pie crimper. It makes me think of all these things…

A perfect day:

Thanks to artists Richard Creighton, Eric Lintala, Stacey Latt Savage, Jim Coates, Ellen Lewis Watson and Nancy Train Smith, and especially, Dartmouth Natural Resources Trust!