VES 113: Altered Landscapes

Today’s class has been a success in Lecturer in Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) Paul Stopforth’s estimation. “Beautiful weather,” he recaps. “Extraordinary color.”

If Stopforth were teaching a Justice section or giving a Biochemistry lecture, these elements might not matter. But his course, VES 113, “Altered Landscapes” is one of Harvard’s few classes to be taught mostly outdoors. Each week, the class boards a shuttle to the Forest Hills Cemetery, where they have obtained permission to create landscape-based artworks. As Stopforth puts it, “We experience the environment moment to moment, for the pure physical pleasure of being in it.”

However, for the students of Altered Landscapes, this sunny afternoon marks one of their dwindling working days. As Stopforth says, “there’s this recognition we all have that the days are running out.” Soon the class will be held indoors more frequently, and students will work with the relics they have collected from the site.

Already, the Carpenter Center’s fourth floor studio is full of transplants. Delicate flowering branches are arranged on tables. Rohny Escareño ’04-’06 uses pushpins to affix mushrooms to the studio’s hematite walls. (Stopforth jokes, “He hopes they will grow there.”) On another table sit the products of the class’ first project: balls of clay into which the class members molded blades of grass, berries, and pinecones from the site.

The students return each week with photos, drawings, and, in one student’s case, videos they have made on-site. Stopforth calls digital cameras “pretty miraculous,” since they allow images to be easily reproduced and shared in class. However, he warns that mere representations of the artworks are limiting. Instead, he teaches an “art of engagement”—a return to “that childlike awareness that eventually gets covered up by our analytical relationship to the world.”

Several in the class have incorporated the graveyard into their artworks. Kotch Voraakhon, a GSD student, uses the headstones to create rubbings, or places inverted versions of the text printed into clay on the graves themselves. As she arranges shards of dried clay, Michael P. Marotta ’06 passes around digital prints of the totem he has been working on at the site. Marotta built a Plexiglass box, five feet tall and one foot wide, with a pyramidal top. He brought it to the cemetery over the weekend, during a snowstorm (flakes obscure the structure in many of the photos). He then hollowed out the ground in front of it in a hole of the exact same dimensions, “like a shallow grave.” Finally, he filled the totem with the soil that had been scooped out. The result is “this weird, bizarrely black obelisk in the middle of the woods,” whose glass reflects its surroundings.

Marotta has also made what he refers to as “canned specimens”—leaves, pinecones, and other ephemera from the site sealed in the sort of jars one might expect to hold jam. He plans to do a series of large-scale drawings of the containers in which they take on what he calls “alien” proportions.

Meanwhile, Escareño, who is using video to document the site, reviews the day’s footage on an LCD screen. The camera follows a trail of red-orange fungus that streaks across his tree. He is working in what he calls “the cemetery of the cemetery”—where gardeners dispose of organic waste. “I almost got hit today,” he says of the rain of tree branches over the area.

Escareño’s project, which examines these dead objects, also makes reference to the cemetery. “The grave itself is an absence. It’s there but the person is no longer,” he explains. “I’m going to keep playing with this absence idea, this disjointed feeling…I like the idea of the grave itself, this marker,” he says as he fast-forwards through a scene.

The mixed media element of the class appeals to many of its students. Marotta, who is doing a senior drawing thesis, noted that “everything I do in the department is taking place on paper. I took this class so I could do site-specific installation. It’s a nice change of pace.” Escareño says he appreciates the fact that students can “play to their strengths.” The course is not, unlike the majority of VES offerings, oriented around a reading-period final project. Escareño calls it a “wholly unique experience; it’s not about the final project, it’s about the trajectory, the larger experience. Each week you get snippets, new bits and pieces.”

Stopforth’s class is physics concentrator Elizabeth B. Wood ’06’s first experience with drawing—she pulls a stack of sketches full of knotted, organic tangles out of her work drawer. However, her main focus in the class right now is a sculptural project. “I found a dead tree and am trying to re-animate it,” she explains. She searches the area for parts the tree needs: she has stripped bark from branches, and found it roots (“they’re kind of like offerings”).

“There was a hole in the tree,” she says wistfully, “about where the heart should have been.” She angles her digital camera to display the cluster of red at its center. “So I tried replacing it with berries.”

—Staff writer Véronique E. Hyland can be reached at hyland@fas.harvard.edu.