Visual

Out on a Limb

The forest and the trees

By Amy Kepferle · Wednesday, July 20, 2011

“I said to myself that I did not come down here to burn up trees, but to paint them. But it rains, so I have to burn.”
—Elizabeth Colborne, Lake Whatcom, 1933

When curator Barbara Matilsky sent out the call for submissions to “Fate of the Forest,” she wasn’t quite sure what to expect.

It was her first attempt at inviting artists to submit to an open hanging at the Whatcom Museum, and she was hoping she’d get a wide range of mediums and personalities represented to augment a long-planned exhibition, “Evergreen Muse,” focusing on the important works of a woman named Elizabeth Colborne.

Apparently, she got the word out in a timely manner. More than 220 artists—some from as far away as Portland, Ore.—submitted pieces, causing the exhibit to spill out of the Lightcatcher space and into the Old City Hall gallery. And, since it was an open hanging, the only caveat was that they needed to become members of the museum.

“It’s a good way of building community and making more people aware of what we do,” Matilsky said during a recent walk-through of the exhibits—both of which, if you haven’t figured it out already, focus heavily on the use of leaves and limbs as subject matter. 

We did it the other way around, but I’d suggest to first-time visitors to “Evergreen Muse” and “Fate of the Forest” that they tour Colborne’s exhibit first, if only to get a historical perspective on the Pacific Northwest of the early 20th Century as opposed to the modern rendition.

Colborne, a graduate of Bellingham High School who went on to live and study in New York City before returning to the Northwest, is known primarily for her stunning colored wood cuts, but a study of the two floors of exhibit space reveals that she mastered any subject she tackled, whether it was black and white nature drawings or children’s books and cookbook covers.

The trees, however, are what stand out where Colborne is concerned. And with good reason; her artistic homages to them are more than paintings—they’re love letters to the natural world.

Keep Colborne’s images in mind when you tour “Fate of the Forest.” They’ll be a good reference point when you take in the plethora of images that show how a general theme becomes personalized.

In some cases—like Jessica Bonin’s “Wiped Out” (a still-life portrait of a stately roll of toilet paper) or Karen Hackenburg’s “Natural Resources” (which featured a sculpture made out of burned matches that is peopled with small figures busy at their everyday jobs)—artists took the topic and applied their own abstraction to it.

Others, being more literal, chose to simply capture the beauty of the forests that remain; through paintings, photography and, in one case, a tree-to-paper etching stretching 24 feet.

Matilsky says she thought she’d get more direct responses to the “fate” in “Fate of the Forest,” but says she understands why those artists chose to capture their subjects that way.

“Even by simply revering beauty,” she noted, “I think it’s calling attention to the potential of losing it.”

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