Art in the Wild
The creative urge and the natural world coexist in sculptures made to serve the environment

BY JOY LANZENDORFER

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder—even if the beholder is a bird.

The artists of Corte Madera’s Meadowsweet Dairy create sculptures few people will ever see. Their pieces are often in remote parts of nature, and even if you happened upon one, you might not realize you are looking at an art sculpture. But that’s OK—it isn’t there just for you, anyway.

The artists specialize in sculptures that double as breeding habitats for local wildlife. Whether it’s a place for bats to roost or seabirds to lay their eggs, these artists use material from the site to create large, elaborate structures that are specially designed to accommodate the needs of the animals.

In this way, they make art that blends in with the environment while at the same time enhancing it.

“When we’re doing site-specific sculptures, we let the piece lead us,” says Glenda Griffith, one of the artists. “We always have an eye to the aesthetic aspects of art, but we use material that relates to the site in some way, and try to harmonize these different elements.”

The artists—who prefer to be called sculptors—are Griffith, Henry Corning and Dan Ustin. Corning, who owns the gallery located on the old Meadowsweet Dairy property, is a soft-spoken man who can eloquently explain why he does what he does. He and Griffith are longtime partners. Ustin, a friend of Griffith, joined the gallery later.

Most of their projects are collaborations not only with each other, but with other artists, contractors and biologists. The collaborative nature of the art is a deliberate attempt to take the ego out of the work and make something that enhances the human relationship with nature.

“In the long run, art is not confirmed as art because it is accessible,” says Corning. “It’s confirmed because it manifests what is sacred to the culture. And it’s hard to find something more precious than nature.”

Southeast Farallon Island, 28 miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge, is the location for two of Meadowsweet’s habitats. The ocean current directly off the island is unusually biologically rich, which makes it an ideal feeding spot for seabirds. With a quarter of a million of 12 species of birds, the island has the largest seabird colony in the contiguous United States.

Because of the island’s importance to the seabirds, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) requires visitors to obtain a permit before they visit. The idea is that without the interference of humans, the island can slowly revert back to wilderness and heal from years of environmental damage.

“The island has a long history of human disturbance,” says Russell Bradley, Farallon Program Manager with PRBO Conservation Science. “The eggs of the common murre were harvested in the Gold Rush—they didn’t have chicken eggs so they ate seabird eggs instead. The whole area used to be covered with tens of thousands of fur seals, which were killed off.”

Corning is one of the few people who can consistently go to the island. Since 1978, he has been a Farallon patrol skipper, meaning he transports personnel and groceries back and forth in his boat. His familiarity with the island led to an opportunity in 1998, when Meadowsweet received a $35,000 grant from the Creative Work Fund to partner with PRBO Conservation Science, then called Point Reyes Bird Observatory, and create an art project for the island.

At first, not everyone was excited about the idea of art on the island.

“I have to admit, in the beginning I wasn’t crazy about the idea,” says supervisory wildlife biologist Joelle Buffa. “I was skeptical, wondering how an art project can fit in with a wildlife refuge, which is so sensitive to human disturbance. But we brainstormed together. We wanted to make something useful that contributed to the island.”

AFTER ALMOST TWO years of brainstorming, the For the Birds project was born. The plan was to build a habitat sculpture that would provide a place for the seabirds to nest.

With the guidance of the biologists, the artists created a stainless-steel frame 6 feet tall with 32 nesting boxes stacked on top of each other. Though the nesting boxes are all the same size, the entrances could be adjusted to accommodate four different species of birds. At its core is a small room, called a bird blind, which lets scientists study the nesting behavior of the birds from inside their burrows.

This frame was lifted by helicopter and transported to the island. The artists helped break up the foundation of a building that had been on the island back when people inhabited it. They then stacked the rubble around the frame to form an intriguing igloo-like structure.

Breaking up the foundation not only freed up more habitat space for the birds, it turned part of the island’s negative history into something positive.

“These weren’t just some rocks we dug up from the ground,” says Griffith. “They were part of the island’s history, so they spoke of the place.”

The project was completed in 2000. Soon after, birds began using it, and more came each successive year. At its height, 18 pairs of Cassin’s auklets and pigeon guillemots were using the habitat. For the scientists, the habitat has exceeded their expectations. It allows them to study the birds in ways they never could have before: up close in their nests.

“It has shown us how birds find new habitat,” says Bradley. “We mark individual birds and assess how faithful they are to their habitat and how that changes through time. Then we use the information about the individual birds as biological indicators for the island as a whole.”

The For the Birds project was such a success that Meadowsweet is in the process of planning a second habitat for the island. This time, FWS has awarded them $55,000 in grants from relief funds for a 1971 oil spill that happened near the island. This particular oil spill had a direct impact on common murres—the same birds the prospecting 49ers stole eggs from. Part of the relief fund mandates that recipients create new breeding habitat for these large black and white seabirds.

Meadowsweet plans to fill in a 100-foot gap between two cliffs. On either side of the gap, colonies of common murres and Brandt’s cormorants have settled. A path runs by the gap in the wall, and the human activity disturbs the birds.

“People walk around that side of the island to access the north landing,” says Griffith. “During breeding season, there’s a whole group of birds that become startled whenever people pass by.” The artists plan to make a wall to fill in this gap. Once the passing biologists are blocked from view, the birds should expand their breeding colony into the area around the wall.

As before, the artists will use an abandoned foundation as the raw material for their structure.

“The Coast Guard finally removed its old diesel tanks and broke up the foundation of concrete that held the tanks,” says Corning. “And this rubble that they crunched up is what we’ll re-deploy in the wall.”

Like the For the Birds project, the wall will contain a blind made of marine plywood and anchored to the island with stainless steel. Common murres fly away when humans approach, but researchers have found that if you can get close enough, you can remove one from the crowd without disturbing the whole colony. So the blind will have a sliding door that will allow scientists to reach out and do just that.

“It will give us a tremendous opportunity to observe the birds at a close distance,” says Bradley.
For the decorative aspect—this is art, after all—the whole thing will be covered in copper, which over time will turn green.
The only downside is that the artists will be doing the bulk of the work this winter, meaning they will be braving storms on an island in the middle of the ocean. They hope to be finished by early next year.

THE CHANCES OF attracting the birds to the new Farallon habitat is almost guaranteed—the birds are already there, after all. But when it comes to Meadowsweet Dairy’s other large project, whether or not the intended creatures will use it is anybody’s guess.

In Alameda County, in a grassy field by the Dumbarton Bridge, stands a 1917 grain silo that local kids call the “Haunted Silo.” It has long attracted vandals and bored teenagers.

“It’s surrounded by suburbia, so of course it’s a kid magnet,” says Griffith. “Even though they’re not supposed to, kids shimmy over fences and hang out in the silo. The Fish and Wildlife Service was worried they would start a fire.” Because of the liability, FWS was planning to tear the silo down, but Meadowsweet convinced the agency to let them make another habitat out of the silo. This time, they would focus on bats. The plan is to line the inside of the silo with plywood and hang several structures measuring 4 feet wide by 8 feet long at different altitudes in the cylinder. The wood will have slots in it for the bats to roost in.

So far, the artists have used a $9,000 grant to secure the inside of the silo from vandals. They have another $22,000 grant from FWS, but they need to raise more money to complete the project. Still, they hope to finish it next year. The bigger question is whether or not the bats will use the silo. Some bat houses are more successful than others. “It’s very hard to attract bats,” says Griffith. “There’s a famous story about a bat house back East. There was a chapel with like 30,000 bats in it, and they built a structure exactly the same 10 feet away, trying to relocate the bats—it took 12 years for the bats to move into the new building.”

But Patricia Winters of the California Bat Conservation Fund is more optimistic that the silo would attract the bats. “It’s not so hard, actually,” she says. “Bat houses are relatively successful. The silo would hold heat, and they like warm roosting spots. There’s a very good chance it would work if they get good advice from biologists.”

The artists are hoping the silo project will draw attention to the benefits of bats, which, it turns out, are misunderstood creatures. They are not blind, do not carry rabies more than any other mammal, and aren’t really that fond of belfries (too windy), according to Winters.

“And they eat a lot of bugs,” says Corning. “That’s their biggest benefit in our surroundings.”

But just in case it takes a decade to attract the bats, Meadowsweet has also worked up a backup plan. The group will design the roof of the silo to attract swallows and the threatened white-throated swift, thought to be the fastest-flying bird in North America. Both birds do nearly everything in flight. The swifts even copulate while flying, and some swifts may sleep in flight. The silo would have a sheltered, hollow space underneath the overhang with holes in it to attract the birds.

THE ARTISTS’ PHILOSOPHY that art should nurture its environment even extends to the building they work in. The former Meadowsweet Dairy was built on a quarry site in 1926. For 16 years, cows grazed in what is now the Town Center shopping mall in Corte Madera. Then in 1942, the dairy was sold and converted into a school.

In the 1980s, a developer bought the building, intending to tear it down and put up 13 condos, but he couldn’t get a water connection. After years of waiting, the developer demanded to know from the Marin Municipal Water District how much longer he would have to wait to be connected. The Water District told him it would be another two to three years. He gave up and sold the dairy to Corning in 1991. Less than a week after Corning bought the place, the water connections went through.

“It was like I placed this basket underneath and everything just fell into it,” says Corning.

Corning wanted to preserve the place’s history, so he kept the original buildings and named the gallery after the dairy. At the gallery, smaller sculptures ranging in price from $1,000-$25,000 are on display. The sculptures are found art—wind-carved logs or redwood burls that have been mounted to enhance their natural beauty. But while these smaller sculptures are bread and butter to Meadowsweet, their real passion lies in their habitat sculptures.

FOR SOME PEOPLE, Meadowsweet’s sculptures stretch the definition of art too far. Can work that no one sees and that emphasizes function over beauty really be called art?

The Meadowsweet Dairy artists are working in a tradition made famous by Andy Goldsworthy, the Scottish artist who makes sculptures in nature out of mediums like leaves, clay, ice and flower petals. Often his creations are destroyed in a matter of hours, and the only record that they ever existed at all are the photographs taken.

The environmental art that Meadowsweet ascribes to takes Goldsworthy’s work a step farther by adding environmentalism and collaboration into the mix. And though it may be the quietest artistic movement ever, this kind of art is happening on a global scale. Sam Bower, who used to work with Meadowsweet, runs a Web site, www.greenmuseum.org, which acts as a virtual studio for environmental artists.

“There’s a lack of institutional support for environmental art,” says Bower. “A lot of times, artists working in one part of the country don’t know what their colleagues in another part of the country are doing. So we wanted a way to bring that information together in one place.”

It’s certainly problematic for people who create art based largely on collaboration to not know about each other. Still, as the movement gains steam, they’ve started connecting. For example, environmental artist Allan Comp asked Meadowsweet to join him in his own collaborative project at SITKA Center for Art and Ecology in Oregon. The project is an experimental collaboration among artists, scientists and the local community to restore nearby Crowley Creek. Meadowsweet will meet with the team to discuss what the role of art will be in the creek restoration.

Whatever it will be, the art aspect of the project will be as essential as any other part, explains Comp. “I firmly believe, in fact I think that I can prove, that science is necessary, but not sufficient, to solve environmental problems,” he says. “Science may fix a problem, but it will not address the cultural issues that created the problem to begin with, and as a result, the problem will probably reoccur.

“And it just seems to me that if you want to fix us and not just a problem, you need a creative, human approach—which is something Meadowsweet understands.”

PHOTOS FROM TOP:

Henry Corning, Glenda Griffith and Dan Ustin work in a gallery/studio at the old Meadowsweet Dairy property. (BY RORY MCNAMARA)

Inside this igloo of rubble is a stainless steel frame with 32 nesting boxes used by four species of birds. Farallon scientists can observe nesting behavior via an inner room.

An abandoned grain silo in the East Bay has been transformed into a habitat for bats.

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