Where biology meets enchantment

“My sculptures exist at the intersection of biology and fairytales,” Beth Galston writes on her studio’s home page. Those two portals to understanding seem to have nothing in common, but biology and fairytales each deliver us from the rata-tat-tat pace of ordinary life – biology through slow, incremental scientific observation and fairytales through enchantment. At the nexus of the two, Beth’s work is quiet as it transports us to other ethereal and natural worlds, and ultimately returns us to ourselves.

Skies were mildly apocalyptic with wildfire smoke the day I visited Natural Connections: Co-creating with Nature at Washington Street Art Center. That already put me in an otherworldly place, and not a comfortable one. Beth’s Beech Columns installation, which she writes about below, is on view there through July 25. She also has work in Say it With Flowers at Concord Center for the Visual Arts through August 11.

Natural Connections spotlights artists who collaborate with nature. Beech Columns features several columns of fragile, fallen beech leaves strung on monofilament in a corner of the gallery, casting gentle, shifting shadows on the wall. Grouped together, they’re a grove’s whispering echo, ghostly, thin and translucent. That day, with a dense yellow sky visible out a nearby window, they reprised the wreckage of the wildfires up north.

The installation delivered me into a realm of ghosts and spirits. But what friendly ghosts! They drift and twirl. They hover and curl. This quiet congregation may be as fragile as its dried leaves, but the space it holds is one of care and substance, a chapel-like place that receives a body’s worries and unease with soft acceptance. The world is on fire; ecosystems burn, but “we are still here,” the beech columns murmur. “We will always be here,” in the stored genetic code of surviving beeches, in the life cycles of trees, in our mythic human imaginations, and in the timelessness of forests.

Beth writes:

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I’ve always been a collector, since I was a little kid. I’d collect leaves, twigs, rocks, shells, fungi, etc and line them up on shelves that filled a wall in my room. I’d spend a lot of time arranging and re-arranging them.