In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, the Forest of Arden is an Edenic retreat where those willing to listen to nature will find “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones.”
Islander Lucy Mitchell inhabits a similar place in her sculpture work, transforming sticks, eggs and other natural finds into singularly graceful and communicative objects that carry their essential wildness into the realm of art.
Recollection, Ms. Mitchell’s new show at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum, curates her own work alongside found and collected items in a one-room treasure house packed with wonders that reach almost to the ceiling.
Aptly subtitled A Personal Museum, this engaging exhibition — like Dr. Who’s Tardis — is bigger than it looks from the outside, with hundreds of mostly small items amid larger examples of Ms. Mitchell’s art, such as her paper-wrapped tree limbs inscribed with abstract line drawings that take the place of bark.
Pressed plants, botanical and wildlife prints, assorted labyrinth diagrams and pages from illuminated manuscripts are among the framed works on the walls, which also hold glass-fronted cabinets and specimen cases filled with artwork and curios.
Instead of hearing sermons in stones, Ms. Mitchell reads messages from them, describing her 2019 Beach Correspondence series as “letters from various beaches about subjects of scientific, visual, and personal interest.”
Made up of small pebbles aligned as carefully as typed words on paper, the “letters” hail from Cedar Tree Neck, Quansoo and other beaches on the Vineyard and in Maine.
Another series, Notebook and Lists, organizes the little stones on smaller pages. Somehow, one can tell they’re more practical and immediate than the bigger thinking expressed in Beach Correspondence. Eggs, in the wild, tend to be fungible things: see one egg of a particular species and you’ve basically seen them all. But an egg that has passed through Ms. Mitchell’s hands has an identity all its own. Among the dozens of eggs in Recollection, many are covered with her signature line drawings, words from books and other minute designs. Perhaps the most arresting example, however, is Ms. Mitchell’s egg with barnacles. What might chip its way into the world from this container marked equally by earth, air and water?
Recollection is full of such unexpected moments: mushrooms and mushroom-like hardware displayed as if one family; a paper-covered tree trunk suggesting the torso of a limbless Greek statue; striped beach rocks shelved against a background of runic symbols.
The overall effect is one less of artifice than of collaboration between Ms. Mitchell and the natural world. And the sheer number of objects, combined with the intimate and detailed nature of the artist’s treatment, make this exhibition one that needs to be experienced, unhurried, at first hand.
Recollection: A Personal Museum by Lucy Mitchell continues through Oct. 18.
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