By Kate Hill
Staff Writer
This month, the Stone Quarry Hill Art Park (SQHAP) disassembled the final remnants of the wooden sculpture “Stacks,” created by New Woodstock sculptor David Harper.
“It has a wonderful history and lots of local connections,” said SQHAP CEO Emily Zaengle on Dec. 9. “It will be sad to see it go.”
“Stacks” was created in 2005 following the completion of Reisman Hall, an art gallery and classroom building on the Cazenovia College campus.
The college invited Harper to propose the initial installation for a rotating exhibit on the gallery’s outdoor Sculpture Court on the corner of Sullivan and Seminary streets.
According to a report written by Harper on the history of “Stacks,” much of the artist’s previous work involved site-specific forms illustrating the interconnectedness between elements of nature and of human design, constructed from wood and other natural materials.
Considering the sculpture’s academic setting, Harper narrowed his focus to the linkages between knowledge and nature, and more specifically between libraries and logs, and between books and bark.
His final design featured tree roots and trunk morphing into rough shelves and finished bookcases from one branch, and crude benches and smooth stools from another. The branches curved to form an outdoor room. The shelves held an assortment of wood blocks progressing into more book-like wood forms and ultimately into actual recycled library discards. Insect carvings and bark textures served to enhance the spines of the wooden books.
“Stacks” was constructed and assembled in late summer and fall 2005. A dedication followed in December.
Harper summarized his intentions for the sculpture in his artist’s statement: “As one of a multitude of quite amazing results of millennia of evolution, we humans owe our allegiance and respect to this fragile planet. All we are has roots in the earth. Our accumulated knowledge has been recorded on stone, clay, plant fibers, petroleum products, and other arrangements of elementary particles. Symbols printed on paper are still a common form of preserving and sharing knowledge. Paper, books, shelves that hold them, and seats we take to study them have been fashioned from fibers created by solar-powered life forms which transform the elements in soil and air. The energy and matter loaned to us and all these other creations will pass through us to unimagined future forms. This installation is an attempt to express my appreciation for this miraculous world.”
Officially titled “Stacks: These Trees Shall Be My Books,” the sculpture borrows part of its name from Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” in which Orlando pins love poems to Rosalind on trees in the forest.
For many years following the completion of “Stacks,” Harper continued to create book-like sculptures from wood, making use of natural wood forms and textures and insect-carved designs.
In 2006, New Woodstock Free Library Director Norm Parry invited Harper to re-install the sculpture in an empty lot adjacent to the library building.
The installation remained on New Woodstock’s main street for three years, during which time it caught the attention of “English Journal” Editor Ken Lindblom, who spent summers on a nearby lake.
Lindblom included a photo of the sculpture on the cover of the journal’s January 2011 “Green English” issue, which was circulated to English teachers nationwide.
Harper and “Stacks” were also featured later that year in the premier issue of “Plank Road,” a local cultural magazine.
The sculpture was eventually relocated to SQHAP at the invitation of Joe Scala, a New Woodstock resident and the newly appointed Art Park director.
The piece was installed just below the crest of the hill in a meadow with nearby tress and a view of the hills to the south.
According to Harper, each of his sculpture’s three homes has its own unique character and interacted with “Stacks” in its own way.
“[The piece] was designed to fit the architectural space at Cazenovia College and obviously reflected the more formal academic setting; at New Woodstock Library, its ‘librariness’ resonated with the place and was more informally appreciated by library patrons and passersby on foot and on the road; and at the Art Park its origin from nature was more fully expressed in the setting of meadow and woods,” Harper explained. “Visitors could comfortably stroll around it from all sides. It is surely fitting that it ended up here where it can comfortably return to its ‘roots.’”
In 2018, Harper reconfigured the installation and planted a young paperbark maple tree in its center.
“I sank the shelves and books into the ground and huddled them toward the center, similarly to how we shrink and curl up as we age,” Harper said. “The tree of course represents the ultimate recycling of materials and our creations to the planet’s original life-givers, which create life from sun and soil on which we all depend.”
Harper and the SQHAP staff removed “Stacks” on Dec. 11, leaving behind only the young tree with a few wooden “books” at its base to serve as “final recycling fertilizer.”
“From the start, I expected ‘Stacks’ to deteriorate and decompose naturally,” said Harper. “With time, the aging process is fascinating to follow, but eventually it became bedraggled, losing its aesthetic appeal. [Emily and I] felt the time had arrived . . . Nothing is forever, which is one of the points ‘Stacks’ has tried to make. However, I know it has given pleasure to many and its memory will carry with them for some time. And images of ‘Stacks’ will still float in the internet cloud.”
Located at 3883 Stone Quarry Rd. in Cazenovia, SQHAP offers a unique environment for artists to create and exhibit their work in natural and gallery settings. It also provides a space for the community to explore and appreciate the natural world and interact with art and artists.
For more information, visit sqhap.org or call 315-655-3196.
