CHESTERWOOD (2024 - 2026)
WORK IN PROGRESS
From autumn 2024 through spring 2026, a section of Chesterwood’s old growth forest has been transformed into an arboreal installation by intentionally known visual artist (who lives locally), Kathleen Jacobs. As the 2025 Helga Orthofer Painter-in-Residence, Jacobs is excited to collaborate with Chesterwood in order to create 18 new paintings. These paintings will first be made by wrapping several varieties of trees with linen, painting the linen, and leaving them for the elements to patina their surfaces. The external forces of nature will work on the painted surface of Jacobs’ paintings, creating a unique dialogue with each work. Jacobs leaves her paintings outside for up to three years to commune with the environment, so that each installation she does has a different exposure.
These wrapped canvases will be exhibited at Chesterwood’s 47th annual contemporary outdoor sculpture show, “Global Warning/ Global Warming”, which will explore the impact of climate change on the mature landscape at Chesterwood.
Visitors can walk the Chesterwood grounds and view each wrapped tree as a single piece, as well as experience the installation as a whole. Each tree is accompanied by a QR code that leads to a brief explanation of its role in the forest and possible ecological threats to the local environment. The installation intends to draw attention to the beauty and importance of the individual organism and elucidate how these different species interact and support each other in a delicate and complex ecosystem.
OLD GROWTH FORESTS
Old growth forests are forests that have been undisturbed by human activity, such as clearcutting, or by major natural disasters, like storms, fire, or disease, allowing various species of trees of different ages to flourish and form a thriving ecosystem. These environments are characterized by their uneven canopies, abundant dead wood, and great diversity of plants, animals, herbs, seeds, lichen, and fungi. These kinds of forests once dominated the landscape of the northeast, particularly the Berkshire foothills ecoregion; however, after extensive logging in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, only one percent of old growth forests still remain.
The negatives of clearcutting are manifold– it increases the danger of wildfires, releases carbon and accelerates climate change, threatens wildlife, depletes soil nutrients, and degrades the water supply– while the benefits of forest preservation are innumerable. Old growth forests store carbon, have greater resilience in the face of disease and climate change, and allow for greater biodiversity.
The opportunity to wander through an old growth forest like Chesterwood is truly invaluable. An old growth forest is not stagnant, and is not a window into the past. Instead, it is a dynamic and constantly evolving environment. Plants grow, reproduce, die, decay, and foster new life; soils build and erode; the wind blows, frost forms then melts, the sun shines, rain and snow fall and evaporate; animals and humans come and go.
Change not only happens on the daily, micro level, but on a more gradual, grander scale as well. The old growth forest is an important resource to protect the Berkshires against the impact of climate change, but the landscape has been, and will continue to be shaped by climate change. As these natural processes take place, they will leave indelible marks on the canvases installed here, and remind us of the power and fragility of nature.