Connection to Place: The Work of Eric Aho and Brece Honeycutt by KK Kozik
What makes a place a place? In Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama’s far-reaching study of nature and culture, he writes that “wilderness does not name itself.” He asserts that the very act of identifying a place “presupposes our presence [as well as] the heavy cultural backpacks we lug with us on the trail.” For Schama, landscape is a human construct that becomes altered as we invest it with our myths and longings. Thus, he adds, even the landscape we “suppose to be most free of our culture may turn out, on closer inspection, to be its product.”
Eric Aho, Small Lake Edge, 2019, Oil on linen, 16 x 20 inches,
Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, NYC and Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Jackson Hole, WY
When an individual interacts with a landscape, however, there is often a slightly different result. It becomes personal. Thoreau, of course, spent two solitary years at Walden Pond, and it was his teacher and his mirror. Wendell Berry, a more contemporary essayist, has discussed how his affection for Port Royal, Kentucky, coaxed him home from Manhattan to farm, write and contemplate. Deep knowledge acquired through cycles of seasons there has enabled Berry to create a portrait of it more comprehensive than any map or scale drawing. He terms this “the intimacy the mind makes with the place it awakens in.” In the New England landscapes that painter Eric Aho and sculptor Brece Honeycutt call home (Saxtons River, Vermont, and Sheffield, Massachusetts, respectively), each has cultivated such a relationship. While Aho and Honeycutt make work that is worlds apart in physical form, they share a process. Inspiration precipitates from slurries of direct experience and cultural legacy. Their work is rooted in a sense of place, and also a sense of time.
Aho’s “backpack” brims with memories: “I grew up in Finland in America. Our home had a culture of storytelling. My father took Finnish mythologies he learned as a child and wove them into Depression-era sagas of his own. … Finnish mythic heroes take on local personas like Peter Hill who teaches my father everything about working the farm, working the woods, which my father passed on to me. My grandmother was said to have never smiled again once she left her loving family in Finland.”
These stories framed Aho’s perceptions. Finland may have been left behind, but in its absence it assumed a looming presence. When Aho moved to small-town New Hampshire at age eight, the surrounding forest became an element of his own reality.
“Formative things of childhood. … There was something about following rivers and streams, swimming and traipsing through the woods that formed a sensory experience. This is what I apply to the paintings. I can conjure familiar smells, pockets of atmospheres and temperatures, these connect to something much larger. The landscape, the sensitivity to the natural world, observing without judgment without asking too many questions, that is Finnish, preparing yourself before going to the woods so you can be part of it. Walt Whitman calls this ‘unminding.’ I do something similar with paintings. They can get overburdened with my demands and my will. I skate lightly because I am trying to access images and memories and experiences. I have failed miserably, wanting it too badly and trying too hard.”
Aho refers to his recent paintings as interiors. Forest walls stand perpendicular to rivers and slabs of ice with few windows of light. He emphasizes that these paintings are not of Saxtons River but about the feelings of being there — “The painting is the place.” These brushy abstractions of nature “don’t exist without Tom Thompson,” says Aho, crediting the early 20th-century Canadian painter of waterfalls, forests and northern lights who kept an easel in his canoe and whose flatness and saturated hues flirt with Post-Impressionism. Aho is likewise at home in these woods, strolls there, skis out to a bog to watch the opening and closing of an “eye” in the ice as it thaws and freezes in the winter. “How does affection play into it? It’s all about that. I have a deep fondness for these places. I know all the tipped trees and the rocks, the sounds. On walks you accumulate that knowledge. The tree cover feels right.” One recalls Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space: “intimacy needs the heart of a nest.”
For Brece Honeycutt, memories of summers with her grandparents on their farm in Hickory, North Carolina, are similarly potent.
“My grandmother was really creative, made lots of things including quilts. I learned color theory and pattern from going to the attic, unfolding the quilts and looking at them. She would laugh at my stitches, she was a perfect stitcher! She taught me about plants and how to cook, stories about family when we went for the yearly cleaning of the graves at the cemetery. She had an amazing green thumb and grew vegetables and flowers. I am inspired by work.”
Brece Honeycutt, Winterfield #2: Stalks and Stems, 2017, Silk/Cotton Thread on Damask, 16 x 15 ½ inches
Investigations into distaff history and toil became the genesis of many of Honeycutt’s early projects. She molded cast paper sculptures from washboards and basins and studied Clara Barton and the Red Cross. She was commissioned to create a project for Wave Hill in the Bronx in 2007 (recently reinstalled) based on flowers mentioned by Emily Dickinson, who was known during her lifetime as a gardener — her poems were secret.
About the same time, Honeycutt and her husband moved onto their 1753 farm in Sheffield. Renovation was needed, and weeds grew all around. Repairing clapboards, her husband discovered a packet of love letters from the 1860s that had been returned to the sender, a broken-hearted young farmer. Honeycutt studied censuses and handwritten diaries to learn more about the people who had lived in the area. Eventually, however, her gaze drifted outside and she began to wonder about the Mohicans the settlers had displaced. She pondered existential questions about what it meant to live there. More than in the house, the answers were in the land.
“There were all these weeds because the place had not been taken care of. I realized that the people who walked on this ground would not be throwing them out, that these plants were good for eating or health or dying. That is what really started me on this path. I started wondering, what is this plant, what do you do with that?”
She learned eco-dying — working with plant pigments to print on paper and cloth. She learned local geology and how soil pH influences which wildflowers grow where. She walked and journaled daily, creating a record of temperatures, and flora and fauna she encountered, journals she reverts to when she wants to know “when the hummingbirds return.” This research was the raw material for her work. After a period of woodshedding, handmade “books” and modest-scaled sculptures emerged from her studio in plenty, constructed variously of dyed and printed elements, found farm implements and reclaimed handwork. Drawing resurfaced in her quiet, white Winterfield series (2017), this time in the form of “lichen”-like stitching. Honeycutt considers herself a citizen-naturalist, one who feels a duty to nurture the land. Wendell Berry terms this “husbandry.”
Honeycutt’s curiosity about history, plant usage and work soon alit on the Shakers, whose major sites lie nearby. Research yielded her the opportunity to render investigations of place into new forms, resulting in Spooled, an installation at the Albany International Airport Gallery about the spirituality of work. Spooled dove into the earlier life of the land where the airport sits off Albany Shaker Road. Its buildings straddle the Shaker herb garden; the grave of Mother Ann (founder of the Shakers) is visible from the on-ramp to the highway. Honeycutt uncovered an accounting from 1836 of work produced by the Shaker Sisters. The list details, inter alia, the amount of thread spun for weaving cloth: 696 runs of tow and linen, 1,981 runs of worsted and wool. Honeycutt points out that one run = 1,600 yards, and the Albany runway is 2,834 yards. The Shaker Sisters’ 1836 output equals walking the Albany runway 1,511 times!
The intimate partnership one forms through working the land is front and center in Honeycutt’s art. Aho’s Ice Cuts series examines the same though the group stands somewhat apart from the rest of his work. Cutting ice for sale was one of his family’s trades in the Depression years and was featured often in their household lore. Each piece from the series has in its title a year from that era. The least lush of Aho’s work, these stark paintings parallel the deprivations of those times. Each depicts an avanto, the Finnish word for a hole sawn in lake ice for post-sauna polar plunges, a personal emblem. Reminiscent of the trapezoids of Ellsworth Kelly and Malevich, these black portals to hypothermia are somber counters to the transcendental joy much of his work evinces.
“I have lots of American optimism and good humor but melancholy is a pretty Finnish attribute. I have that, too,” Aho admits. “I was a teenager in the ’80s. Talking Heads lyrics run through my mind — ‘Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.’ For me, paintings are that place. Nothing is lost there. I share cultural anxiety about loss in the natural world, but loss is also the loss of childhood, the loss of innocence.”
Eric Aho, Americana, 2021, Oil on linen, 52 x 48 inches, Courtesy of the artist and DC Moore Gallery, New York
Aho has specifically memorialized the latter in The Continental Series, a paean to his father, a just-drafted soldier who landed in Normandy right after D-Day, When records detailing the regiment’s day-to-day march across Europe were released, Aho undertook a pilgrimage to follow these steps, stopping and painting where the regiment paused.
“It was a desperate act of connection to my father … to understand this violent loss of innocence. He didn’t talk about the war at all. As I began a family I wanted to know my father better. … On one occasion I sat and painted under similar blue skies on the same day in August that an extraordinary battle occurred, yet he remarkably survived. ... it was a way to connect to him imaginatively through tiny bits of details, to use the landscape to form a picture of this person. It’s amazing what the landscape can tell you. Maybe the response to [your question about] intimacy is in there. I wasn’t able to ask my father these questions, but I could ask the landscape.”
Honeycutt joins Aho in this impulse to stem the tide of loss through art. During one recent residency, she created a calendar of daily plant rubbings on paper as a carpe diem Hail Mary to mark the progress of a season. “Plant material is fugitive. Things made with plants will probably fade … they would fade anyway back into the earth,” she has said. Too, the found materials she adopts, wrought by other hands, are reminders of the missing and of the fleetingness of life in a Vanitas sense.
Brece Honeycutt, Winterfield #2: Stalks and Stems, 2017, Silk/Cotton Thread on Damask, 16 x 15 ½ inches
During this pandemic year, Honeycutt found a silver lining as one of six individuals selected for a pilot project, the WPA-styled Artists at Work. She was paired with Hancock Shaker Village and Camphill Center for adults with disabilities and worked on a series of found textile pieces examining codified Shaker uses of color. Aho has also benefited, finding more time to spend with each painting, divulging “that is the real pleasure in the work. Being in the middle of a painting is where I want to live. Over the years I haven’t given myself enough time to enjoy that.”
The pandemic has demanded much from all of us, artists included, and the resulting diaspora from urban America has brought many to new climes. While not all transplants will get religion about back to the land, the role of place as a motive for making art seems newly resonant. While we in our complicated fashion look to landscape for many things, and seize more than we give, there is space for optimism. If the landscape works its magic on those it enfolds, more may caretake what they care about. To quote Simon Schama again, “The cultural habits of humanity have always made room for the sacredness of nature.”
