Joe Wheelwright. (Photo by Lisa Aciukewicz)

Those people fortunate enough to be in the audience last Sunday for a post-season event at Fruitlands Museum were treated to poetry written during the year by artist-in-residence Susan Edward Richmond, and to a preview of sculptor Joe Wheelwright’s upcoming two-year exhibition of Tree Figures, scheduled to be installed at Fruitlands next June.

Musing on her experience, Richmond described Fruitlands as a “landscape with a curator.” She spoke of the diversity of the exhibits, which represent Transcendentalists, Shakers, Native Americans and 19th-century portrait painters.

“It’s not about a subject,” she explained. “It’s about a vision of a particular place in a particular time.”

She added that the landscape in common was rural New England, mostly 19th century, and the vision came from the museum’s original curator—Clara Endicott Sears.

Speaking in the Picture Gallery, surrounded by the majestic landscapes of the White Mountains exhibit, Richmond delighted listeners with some of the poems she wrote during her residency. “Tracks,” consisting of four verses in haiku form, playfully chronicles her observations of Fruitlands’ 21st-century landscape through the seasons. “White Mountain Vignettes” describes some of the individual paintings currently on exhibit. During the season, Richmond read these to touring schoolchildren, leaving out their give-away titles, and engaged the students with guessing which painting each vignette described.

Richmond was inspired by the Fruitlands library collection of Harvard Shaker journals. She had the voices of these Shakers in her head when she wrote “Sisters’ Work, Brethren Work” about the division of Shaker labor, and “Increase” about the challenge of growing as a community for the celibate Shakers. After observing a cradle in the Fruitlands Shaker building that was much too long for any baby, she wrote “Shaker Cradle” from the perspective of a cradle-ridden elder approaching the end of his life.

Outgoing Fruitlands artist-in-residence Susan Edward Richmond and her husband, Jim. (Photo by Lisa Aciukewicz)

“The Mounting Block” was inspired by the structure at the entrance to the Shaker building. Designed for access to carriages, it becomes a metaphor in the poem for the transition between spiritual and earthly worlds.

“But now I think there are not metaphors
that speak for God, only the things that are, the tree
shaking itself inside out in ecstasy, and drab skirts
stepping off onto a carriage
where the world begins.”

Fruitlands director Maud Ayson, thanking Richmond for becoming part of the museum family, presented her with a framed photograph of the same structure.

“She has challenged us to look at Fruitlands in a new way,” Ayson said.

“Surely trees and humans have a common ancestor,” wrote Joe Wheelwright, next year’s artist-in-residence, who also looks at things in a new way. “I have a habit of seeing things upside down in nature,” he quipped to his audience.

His conviction that human beings are related to trees is borne out by his sculptures, which literally morph trees into humans by turning them upside down. The bifurcated trunk becomes the legs; the strong horizontal roots, the arms; and the tangle of smaller roots, the hair. The result is strikingly and eerily human.

A renowned sculptor who works in stone and bronze as well as wood, Wheelwright has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions, including one at nearby DeCordova Museum. As a boy, Wheelwright told his listeners, he was fearful of trees. He described the terror of navigating his long driveway flanked by menacing oak trees. He mastered his fear but continued his fascination by drawing them—they were his grade school trademark. His earlier tree sculptures were on a small scale, until he developed the machinery that would enable him to manipulate the big trees he harvests from his land in East Corinth, Vt. Lately, he has returned to working smaller pieces and casting them in bronze.

Next spring, he is scheduled to install eight of his large tree figures at Fruitlands, where they will be an integral part of the landscape for two years. The eight figures, created during the last five years from pine, cherry, yellow birch, and hornbeam, are described by Wheelwright as being “of good size,” an understatement, considering the fact that some of them tower to almost 30 feet. “They are large versions of the tree figures I have created over a 30-year period, and this exhibition will be the most complete statement of this aspect of my sculpture to date,” he wrote in an email from his studio in Boston.

Wheelwright describes Fruitlands’ rolling uphill terrain as the ideal site for showcasing his tree figures. “They will romp and stalk the landscape,” he writes. Not unlike Richmond’s poetic interpretations, his sculptures will prove both the timelessness and adaptability of Miss Sears’s vision and exemplify the strong connection between art and nature.

“When Clara Sears first walked this slope, did she see it all at once- a landscape painted on her own canvas, this corner of New England enshrined, the one she knew and couldn’t bear to see passed by?” —Excerpt from “Landscape with Curator” by Susan Edwards Richmond