Todd Smith & the Bernheim Forest Artist Residency

Sculptor and current Bernheim Forest Artist-In-Residence Todd Smith may be the only man in Louisville who can claim to have been mistaken for a bird. But in all fairness to the man who misidentified him, he was perched on a tree branch about sixty feet above the ground at the time. This case of mistaken identity occurred during a period between 2007 and 2010 when Todd climbed a tree every day as part of an artistic ritual. Nearly every one of his daily death-defying climbs (of which there were over a thousand, and which could take him to heights of a hundred feet or more) was documented with snapshots and confessions in his blog, The Daily Climb.

Todd Smith has been making art about trees since around 2003, when he was a student at Amherst College, and he is still going strong. His passion for tree-climbing has taken many forms and mediums through the years, extending all the way from some rather innocuous “human nests” that he built out of large branches, to some truly haunting photographic spectacles. When I met Todd in his Bernheim Forest art studio in early January, about two years had passed since he had completed The Daily Climb project. Since then, he has had several exhibitions at Zephyr Gallery in Louisville, has completed and exhibited a significant work of public art, and has been working as a freelance art handler for several local galleries. As we walked together to his lakeside studio on the grounds of Bernheim, he mentioned The Daily Climb blog to me casually, almost in passing. At the time, I was unfamiliar with the project. But I made a note to look it up.

I’m glad I did, because the adventure he chronicles in The Daily Climb blog is as unparalleled among his larger body of work as it is difficult to categorize. As an extended narrative, The Daily Climb isn’t as immediately powerful as, for example, his Haunt series, in which photographer Natalie Biesel documented him wrapped in glowing bundles of cloth and hanging from tree limbs. But the eventual impact of The Daily Climb blog is strong. What emerges on these pages is a human being who is striving to be something bigger and better than himself. At times it feels like an opportunity that Werner Herzog missed.

Todd moved back to Kentucky in 2007 in order to reboot his life as an artist. Frustrated and disappointed with the life he was living in Portland, Oregon, he quit his job, ended a long-term relationship, and resolved to structure his day and year and career and life according to one rule: every day he would climb a tree. He would climb a tree regardless of weather, health, or social context; indeed, he blogs at various times about climbing during a tornado warning, climbing with the threat of imminent diarrhea, and climbing between dinner courses at one of Steve Wilson and Laura Lee Brown’s upscale artist parties. Much like in a novel or a film, the personal discoveries that occur for Todd during the arc of this three-year timeline aren’t always spelled out as such. In fact, it took him 219 days until the revelation that the project was like therapy for him: “I realize this daily climb has become so much more than just a task for an art project.  I have come to depend on it for structure, comfort, connection to me and to the outside.” I found his openness about his struggle with idleness to be refreshing in a world where artists can spend so much effort posturing. In place of an erudite artist statement or a carefully groomed CV, Todd’s blog gives us realities like this:

“So I’ve been avoiding responsibility, escaping into T.V. [Lost]. I’m allowing the time-suck and before I know it, I haven’t eaten or climbed. I got up and drove to Taco Bell off Route 150. I ate way too much [3 – 1/2 lb bean, cheese, & rice burritos] too fast and felt awful. But I had to climb… or I wanted to climb before I lost all daylight … I found a tree on the corner of someone’s property. It was just over the fence from the shopping place. A large tree, volume-wise, and low branches. Besides my bulging belly the climb was easy … The sunset wasn’t great, nor the view. I broke a lot of branches too. In general, this climb only slightly elevated my mood, but raised it nonetheless. By the time I got back to the ground my stomach pain from dinner was gone.”

Anyone, artist or not, could take that paragraph and replace the words “time-suck” and “climb” with his or her own personal vice and its resolution, and by doing so I think they just might find a way to relate to Todd’s struggle with finding meaning in daily life. But relevant as this anecdote may be to everyman, there are plenty of breathtaking photographs and stories on Todd Smith’s blog to balance out the humble moments, and to remind readers that what Todd has done is in fact extraordinary. He shows us a photograph of a white horse standing beyond the tops of a dark pine trees, the bright flashes of tree limbs at night, a swarm of buzzards circling the sky at eye level, icicles, horizons, sunsets, and bright red turning leaves. In one post, we feel the poignancy of Todd watching a high school baseball game alone from the top of a tree, and in another, of Todd being moved to kiss a tree at night. Then you get a description of what it feels like to hold onto a tree trunk eighty feet high and sway in the wind. The super-human imagery contained in all of this is the perfect pairing for the humanity of his words.

So what became of that project? A small exhibit of the some of the first blog entries from The Daily Climb was mounted at the Mary Anderson Center in Southern Indiana just a few months after he began the blog in 2007, but a more comprehensive curation of the three-year project has yet to be made. He never turned into the Forrest Gump of tree-climbing, as he had daydreamed about in later entries, and so a national “Tree Climbing Society” of Todd-followers never did get off the ground. Still, he came close to something similar by founding a Louisville chapter of Parkour, a free-roaming, King Kong-like sport in which the world becomes one’s obstacle course. But that’s a story for another day.

At Bernheim Forest, I asked Todd what made him stop climbing after those three years, and he said that one day he “just forgot,” and so the chain was broken. He admitted to feeling a bit relieved that after that he was free to climb whenever he pleased, rather than out of a sense of obedience. Looking back, I wonder whether the daily tree-climbing was like any other kind of therapy, and if it worked so well that he was able to discontinue treatment.

Now that he is living at Bernheim and working toward completing a new art installation, Todd has once again found a reason to retreat into nature and give himself time to refine his work. The Bernheim Artist-in-Residence (AIR) program is awarded each year to one or more artists who will then live for several months rent-free in a private log cabin on the premises, where they create artwork in a studio surrounded by forest and overlooking a lake. They receive a stipend to defray some of their costs of living and their material expenses, and are given access to all the facilities of the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest during their stay in exchange for donating at least one work of art and presenting an exhibition or public program.

Everyone at Bernheim—from the scientists and researchers who work there year-round, to the artists that are invited throughout the year to commune with the forest—is very attuned to trees. The Visitor Center was built in 2007 around the idea of “imagining a building like a tree,” and was the first building in Kentucky and five surrounding states to be given a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum certification—the highest honor that can be bestowed upon environmentally sustainable architecture.

At the time of my visit to Todd’s studio, there was still much for him to finish before his public lecture at the Bernheim’s Education Center gallery on January 21st. He was building a giant interactive cardboard “nest”, a structure soon to be nestled into a nearby tree. Inside the nest there is a soft bed-like area, like an egg or a space capsule, with a few lights and a small hole for a person to peer out of. Not surprisingly, he has imposed a rule upon himself to only use found materials to create this sculpture. The mountains of cardboard lying all around him were salvaged from the city and brought down in his truck. Even the tools in his studio were not to be bought, so his dull X-Acto knife blades had to be sharpened on the cement steps that lead to his studio. Working around these self-imposed limitations seemed to satisfy him. A mysterious hatchet that appeared on his desk during my visit raised some suspicion that one of the “woodsmen” was aware of his found materials rule and had taken pity on him, leaving it there for him to find.

Before I left the forest that day, Todd and I walked down to the lake with Bernheim’s Visual Arts Coordinator, Martha Winans Slaughter. As we were exchanging stories about exotic trees and about which wood some Native American tribes considered sacred, we spotted an enormous grey heron. We watched as it swept over the water and landed on the very top of a pine tree, just like a Christmas star. If there was any moment to feel inspired to join a Tree Climbing Society, and to hoist oneself up to become a voyeur, a spectacle, and a conqueror of every surrounding object all at once, this would have been it. Of course, I didn’t. I decided to be content with knowing that the forest at Bernheim has an abundance of trees and time, all of which are being put to good use by birds like the grey heron, and by artists like Todd Smith.

–Julie Leidner

get involved with the Arts In Nature at Bernheim Forest:

Apply for the residency:

The Artist-in-Residence program is available to artists in any medium, at any stage in their career. Says Bernheim: “Artists are encouraged to use this residency to further investigate, experiment, and explore avenues in their work. Bernheim is most interested in work that furthers our understanding of the relationship between contemporary art and the natural world.” The deadline for 2012 residency program has passed, but applications for the next year’s residencies will be accepted starting November of this year. Heike Endemann and Todd Smith were chosen from a pool of 48 applicants representing 12 countries.
Find out more here: www.bernheim.org/artNres.html

Go to the CONNECT avant-garde music
and experimental art event:

The date for this year’s event is to be determined, but the CONNECT festival at Bernheim Forest’s Lake Nevin is worth watching out for.  The Bernheim press release says it best: “CONNECT attendees are encouraged to roam around the circumference of the lake. While doing so they may encounter, engage and/or frolic with artists, experimental musicians, naturalists, scientists, actors, dancers, sustainability advocates, mimes, lunatics, puppeteers, filmmakers, all engaged in some sort of endeavor, performance, installation, social interaction, and/or experiential science.”  Last year’s features included films projected onto trees, floating fire sculptures, a field of telescopes, and plenty of food and beer.
More here:  www.bernheim.org/connect.html

Help the Global Sculpture Program:

This program brings national and internationally recognized artists to Bernheim Forest every two to four years to install a work of art.  This April, artist Patrick Dougherty will be building one of his giant, whimsical sculptures made of harvested willow branches, and is looking for volunteers to help with the process. Interested artists and samaritans should contact nature@bernheim.org to get more information.

Check out the work of past
Bernheim Artists-In-Residents:

Many artists have left a visual impression on the forest.  Next time you’re on a trail, make sure to keep an eye out for work by former artists-in-residents like the German chainsaw buff Heike Endemann.  Her twisting cedar abstractions can be found around the education building, as well as on her website at www.heike-endemann.net/english/.

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