BirchBarkMosaics

Short answer: Alaska

During seven adventurous years in America’s 49th State, most of my days revolved around getting outside to walk some equally adventurous huskies. The three sisters — Ginger, Shilo, and Beachy — led me through acres of birch, aspen, and spruce forests in our Fairbanks neighborhood. They were intent on catching foxes but I kept an eye out for stray pieces of birch bark shed by the smooth, pale and abundant birch trees.

Back at the house, I started piling those tattered bits on a workbench in the laundry room, where it was cozy despite the arctic chill outside. I noticed the curled pieces sometimes had multiple layers, and separating them gave me a satisfying feeling of discovery when it revealed subtle textures, colors, and nuances beyond the tissue-paper like aspect that most defined birch bark in my mind.

One evening, after I’d hauled home some dinged-up wooden frames from the thrift shop, I wondered if the birch bark would be useful in hiding the imperfections. So I pulled out my art supplies and found that the same gel gloss medium I used for photo transfers was a good adhesive for the unique properties of birch bark. (I’ll explain the technical stuff in a later blog post.)

My first “birched” frame was, I thought, a bust. It was more chaotic and patch-worked than I’d envisioned. My intent was for it to look organic, perhaps like the random ways I’d found bits of birch bark in the woods. But it lacked an energetic grace that unfolds in nature. I leaned it against the wall it in my makeshift studio, and kind of forgot about it.

Was it a week later? Was it a month or two? It could have been a year. I was busy starting grad school, helping raise teenaged stepkids with a man whose moods could overwhelm, working at the University of Alaska, making new friends, and trying to keep up with a couple of rambunctious pups. I can’t recall now, as I lean back on memories from nearly twenty years later, but eventually I pulled out the other scuffed up frame and tried again, this time aiming to create more of a pattern out of the random bits. This time, I liked the results a bit more, and started to think about all of the other things that weren’t quite to my liking that would be improved by birch bark. (Unfortunately, birch bark doesn’t apply to a marriage and, try as we might, art could not fix it so I packed up and moved back.)

By the time I returned to Michigan, I’d collected a lot of the white stuff… (you know, birch bark, not snow. Michigan has enough of that.) Much of it came from a build-site where large stately birch trees where felled to put up cabins; with permission, I razored off thick slabs of bark from the piles of firewood. Some amazing hues and patterns of stoma — kind of like breathing holes in the wood, those flecks define a real “birchy” look — revealed themselves.

I still didn’t have time to play with it in an in-depth way; and I really hadn’t formulated a clear idea of what to do with it. I just knew I liked the way it looked and wanted to keep exploring its potential.

Finally, back in my Ann Arbor home, I unpacked those bins of birch, unpacked the memories that travelled with it, and began to really explore.

And here we are…