ART BLOSSOMS

A metal Pumpkin Patch sprouted near Mrak Hall in the stand of cork oak trees­­—three coppery gourds of wire with wind-chime seeds, shiny metal disks clanging within. Shimmering in dappled light and reflecting dried oak leaves, the sculpture seemed like it wasn’t quite there.

And then suddenly, like Cinderella’s coach, it wasn’t.

Up and down the arboretum, other environmental sculptures did the same appearing and disappearing act—a one- to two-week blossoming of student design that turned the arboretum into a here-now, gone-tomorrow Zen art gallery.

Each spring, the works by students in Professor Barbara Shawcroft’s design course “Structures in the Landscape” take me by surprise, like strange new flowers in a familiar land. They often lead me on impromptu detours; the row of sculptures entice me farther down the garden paths than I had planned, to an arboretum I had never quite seen before.

But Pumpkin Patch had no close neighbors. Curious about its sister works, I got directions from Shawcroft and headed west on bike through the arboretum on an art scavenger hunt:

• Through the acacia grove to a gravel road to Privacy Revealed—a grouping consisting of a painted bathtub, a pedestal sprouting dried flowers and a sink with eyes—then to If Rocks Could Speak, 10 boulders, each painted a different color, lining the road;
• To a huge fallen oak branch where Arachnophobia, a spider of black PVC pipe and fan cages, sprawled;
• Past Putah Creek Lodge and around the boathouse pond to Jigsaw Chess, with paper-plate faces on waist-high pieces (“You can play it,” Shawcroft encouraged);
• Backtrack to search for Windowscapes, which I missed the first time because I hadn’t looked up the slopes above the path;
• And finally to a trio of interactive works in a stubbly field between Shields Grove and the School of Veterinary Medicine horse paddocks—Lotus Labyrinth, Thundering Canopy and Overlapping Shadows.

Coming back by a different route the next morning, I suddenly got what I had missed before—the purple, red, pink and white “petals” of the labyrinth echoed the colors of the sage flowers, roses and other drought-hardy plants in the Storer Garden. I sat on the pillows inside the fabric flower, looked out at the Shields oak grove and listened to the cacophony of egrets and night herons nesting in the trees. And then, I better understood Thundering Canopy. And while I had yet to see anyone else near the works, someone had rearranged Shadows’ stackable 12-sided modules.
Students had picked the sites for their works after a class tour of the arboretum.

“When we were walking around the arboretum and we came out to that field, there were all the trees and all the herons making that big racket,” said junior Dirk Johnson who created Thundering Canopy with classmate Megan Arauzo. “I wanted to reflect what was happening with all the birds there.”

A week or two after installing their works, students were required to take them down.
“It’s just something you accept from the beginning. The idea is to make it friendly to the arboretum—the whole tread lightly idea,” said junior Kevin McGuirk, as he took apart Jigsaw Chess, which he created with classmate Chester Guo. McGuirk, an aspiring clothing designer from Oakland, juggled tools with crutches, his knee ligament torn in a wakeboarding accident.

Some students, like Labyrinth co-creator and textile design major Allison Roberts, planned to rebuild their works in backyard gardens. But many of the works, fashioned from recycled materials, would become salvage again. Many of the students, including Roberts, would graduate and leave Davis soon after dismantling their works.

Design Professor Shawcroft, who has offered the course every spring quarter since 1986, said she always uses the arboretum because it helps teach students, many of whom have never worked on a large scale before, about proportion, scale and building self-supporting 3-D structures.

“It also helps the students to identify with and realize the beauty and wonder of nature,” Shawcroft said.

For those of us who happen upon the exhibit while it lasts, the projects can change our own relationship to the landscape as well, taking us off our regular paths and making us pay attention to things we might otherwise miss. I now know where the acacia grove is. I discovered that Shields Grove, over the past few years, has become an egret and heron rookery and their waste a growing threat to the oak collection. A hand-dyed fabric lotus now connects, in my mind, two new alumni with a 1913 UC alumna—Storer Garden’s namesake, the late Ruth Storer, who became Yolo County’s first pediatrician, married zoology professor Tracy Storer and loved gardening.

And from time to time, I still peer in the cork oak shadows outside Mrak Hall, as if the Pumpkin Patch mirage might magically return.

— Kathleen Holder