Sapling Sculpture Calls to Primal Instincts

Wandering through the last Sunday, I expected to see plenty of natural beauty. The most striking element in the grounds, though, turned out to be an alluring piece of constructed art.

Like a huddled cluster of woody mammoths, the five frost-coated elements of Patrick Dougherty’s “Natural History” sculpture appear to be primeval parts of the natural landscape. A closer inspection will not disturb hibernating beasts, though, as the nestlike forms allow visitors to step between them and even inside their hollows.

If the sculpture inspires a sense of child-like wonder or a surge of wild exuberance, that would be in keeping with Dougherty’s vision.

“We characterized it as a place for feral children and wayward adults,” said Doughtery on the phone from California, where he is working on another outsize stick sculpture for the Palo Alto Arts Center. “I thought that New York City has plenty of architecture but not enough lairs.”

Slipping inside one of the sculpture’s elements, suddenly sheltered within a dark, quiet cove, feels like stepping back into a childhood hideaway. The curved enclosure transports you not just to another place, but to a time in the past.

Doughtery – who lives, aptly, in a hand-built log house in North Carolina – associates sticks with childhood play and imagination, and identifies them as “part of our common experience.” He works solely with sticks and saplings, flexing and weaving them together to craft ethereal forms in outdoor settings.

Although viewers may not recognize Dougherty’s sculptures at first as works of art, detached as they are from museum or gallery contexts, his pieces belong to a tradition of outdoor installation art that sprang up in the 1950s and has since continued in the work of David Nash, Andy Goldsworthy, Nancy Holt, Richard Long and others. Although viewers of his work are “not always sure what it is or how it got there,” Dougherty said, “people are amazed at how well something gets spun into the space.”

Dougherty built “Natural History” between August 5-20 last year with the help of numerous volunteers and experienced gardeners – the benefit of creating something in a place like the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, he acknowledged. This installation is the first he has ever made in a botanic garden.

The volunteers helped gather nonnative willow and woody material from Ocean Breeze Park on Staten Island for the sculpture. While the piece will remain up until it begins to fall apart – at least another year, the sculptor reckons, at which point it will be dismantled and returned to the earth – an accompanying photography exhibit at the botanic garden about Dougherty’s work, “Stick Art,” will close Jan. 30.

In keeping with the ephemeral nature of his art, “I accept vulnerability as part of the material and part of the sculptures,” Dougherty said, “and part of human life.”