Autumn Leaves

Walking through the woods recently, I passed this installation, called The Forms.

The Forms represent the basic building blocks of the constructed world. They are one part of Timelines, the trail at Glen Villa that explores ideas about history, memory and our relationship to the land.

The colours of the plexiglass shapes stood out from the muted tones around them, attracting me like a magnet. Closer, I noticed leaves scattered on top of them, some haphazardly, some artfully arranged.

The contrast in colours atop the orange square was not as dramatic as that atop the blue cube but the arrangement itself was even more intriguing. To my eyes, the space created by torn leaves appeared to be an opening into a hidden world below, and I wanted more than anything to go beneath the surface and explore that other world .

A hole in one red leaf offered a flawed beauty …

… while crumbling brown leaves pointed to the decay that inevitably would follow.

Yet the sight that pleased me the most was what was happening inside the long yellow rectangle.

There I saw a striking contrast between the world all around that was closing up for winter and the vigorous growth inside that pointed in the opposite direction. The grasses growing in the built form made me think of weeds springing up in the cracks of stone walls and city sidewalks, of the determination of living things to grow and survive no matter where they are.

More to the point, it struck me as ironic, that the artificial box I’d made to suggest a contrast between the built and the natural world nonetheless sheltered and aided that natural world to find a way of its own.

Nature rules!