Golden Bough Landscape Architecture

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GOLDEN BOUGH LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

OUTDOOR

Stone River View
Stone River View
Stone River View
Stone Joint Detail
Stone Bridge
Marble Woods Sentinel
Flying Rocks
Troy Courtyard
Cave Path Entry Ladder
Hanging Stone Trail Marker
Hanging Wood Trail Marker
Lightening Bridge
Bluestone Wall
Stone Cairns

INDOOR

Walter
Two Headed Porcupine
View of full studio in Rome
Suspended Log
Full studio in Rome
Stone Janus
Standing Wood Thing

PROFILE

I have a strong personal and professional interest in ecology, and the cultural importance of the land.

My company Golden Bough provides design/ build landscape architectural services. My emphasis is on stone work, native planting and drawing connections between people and the land. Unlike many landscape architectural firms, I physically build the things I design.

I am a registered landscape architect in good standing in Massachusetts. I received the Prince Charitable Trust Rome Prize (2004) awarded by the American Academy in Rome which is arguably one of the highest honors in my profession.

I graduated from Harvard University with a Masters degree in landscape architecture in 1995 and I am a graduate of Cornell University where I received a bachelor of science degree in forest ecology in 1989. At Cornell I worked on a wide variety of ecological topics including climate change, fine root growth, ozone impacts, and human land use patterns as they relate to forest ecology in New England and New York.

I do unaffiliated research in archaic and bronze age earth magic and stone joinery.

Jon Piasecki

Registered Landscape Architect in MA

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ArchDaily
ASLA Award
Stone River
Design Observer
Orion Magazine
Landscape Architecture
House and Garden
Berkshire Living
Departures Magazine

ArchDaily Stone River / Jon PiaseckiArchDailyOctober 13, 2011by Christopher Henry Jon Piasecki recently received a 2011 Honor Award from ASLA for his Stone River project. The magic of this project lies in the details. You need to watch the video (after the break) to appreciate the painstaking effort and attention to detail that went into this project.http://www.archdaily.com/173867/stone-river-jon-piasecki/

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ASLA Award

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Jon Piasecki is a 2011 recipient of an Honor Award by the The American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA). The awards honor the top public places, residential designs, campuses, parks and urban planning projects from across the U.S. and around the world. High-resolution images and full project information can be viewed at www.asla.org/2011awards. The jury of leading design experts considered 567 entries and selected 37 winners in the categories of General Design, Residential Design, Analysis and Planning, Communications, Research and the Landmark Award. In addition to the quality of the design, the jury also weighed the environmental sensitivity and sustainability of each project.

Stone River Stone River: The Passion of Jon Piaseckiby Orion Magazine Novermber 2009A short profile of landscape artist and Orion contributor Jon Piasecki.Camera, editing, and direction by Hal Clifford and Jason Houston. Produced by Orion magazine. view short film >

Design Observer William Drenttel and Jon Piasecki: The Stonework of Jon PiaseckiDesign Observer October 2009Over the past decade at Winterhouse, we have art directed the building of 600 feet of stone walls. There is something monumental about doing this kind of work, since these walls will last hundreds of years, eventually shifting into ruins. We are not starting from scratch: Ezra Winter built hundreds of feet of walls in the 1930s to define the terrain, to rope in shifts in elevation, to define gardens...read more >

Orion Magazine The Nature of WallsOrionJanuary | February 2008by Jon PiaseckiWhy we build them, how they fail us"The most important trait needed to turn an enormous pile of stones into a wall is not strength, though it helps."Building a dry-laid stone wall is an exercise in patience. The first step is to figure out where the wall goes on the land. To do this well you need to decide what the wall has to do. Does it retain earth behind it? Is it free-standing? Does it mark a boundary? Then you have to choose the stone.After varying amounts of effort and the expenditure of a significant amount of money, you face a rather daunting and even poetic situation: you must make order from a chaotic pile of perhaps a hundred tons of stones of various shapes and sizes. They sit heavy on the ground.When you build a wall you have to arrange and stack them. Usually they are placed on a foundation of compacted gravel dumped in a trench, and as a general rule I lay the biggest stones low in the wall. Then the stacking and bonding starts. It took me a few years to learn how to find the "face" of the stone. It is easier now.The most important trait needed to turn an enormous pile of stones into a wall is not strength, though it helps. it is persistence. The wall in progress is a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle that on completion can last for hundreds if not thousands of years, and it all gets built a little bit at a time.When you examine a wall, the skill of the mason becomes obvious straightaway. Are the joints bridged? Are there bonding stones that go deep into the wall? Do the stones fit well? I have studied walls for the past decade or so. They have a beautiful logic of stacking and solidity. They are fixed, but when laid righteously they are flexible. They can move in a fluid way along mountains, as do the agricultural terraces in South America, or they can anchor a people to history, as does the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.Though the requirements, materials, techniques, and design of walls are as varied as the people who build them, all walls have one thing in common.They all fail.The barbarians eventually get through. The city gets sacked. Water undermines the foundation and the terrace crumbles. The excluded arrive. The contained escape. Time and nature always win. Now we dig below ground to find the traces of the proud stones that once lifted the ambitions of their builders into the sky and held the threat be it famine, flood, or invasion-at bay for a short while.When I stack a wall, I imagine the specific threats to its stability. Is the ground around the wall shaped to shed water? Is there a way out for the water that builds up behind a wall?Are there tree roots or foundation faults that will endanger sections of the wall?The process of imagining failure leads to a better wall every time. In addition, it becomes a creative driver of the specific form of the wall. These problems require solutions, and to make a good wall is to adjust to these specifics. Of course, there are terminal failures awaiting my walls that I cannot imagine, and some of the threats I dream up will never come to pass. These efforts are not a waste. They help me to animate my little projects, and they have led to some larger-scale thinking.When you build walls, you have plenty of time to think. The focus of my thought has been on walls of the mythic past, like the Servian Wall in Rome. In the West, ancient walls like that are early examples of a practice that continues to be important to this day: walls are the way that people mark their place on the land. Those walls mark a critical point of intersection between ancient culture and nature. Ancient walls made a magic circle inside of which the accepted rites of "the people" were performed. They marked an exact line where culture met the raw matrix of what we consider the natural and the ancients saw as a supernatural world. Where citizen rubbed up against enemy. Where the city both touched and turned away from the wild. The prime inheritance of this beginning is that culture is "us" and nature is "other."Defensive walls, however, have an overlooked consequence. A wall designed to keep something out has to restrict whomever it is protecting within its confines. While it seems a success that nothing can breach the walls and give threat, in the end the walls will fall-and in the meantime their standing creates a deadly problem: people held within the walls are trapped with whatever internal threats the walls contain.If nature's story were to have a brief synopsis it would be this: life, cataclysm, survival, adaptation, and regeneration. The natural world and evolution have a robust and proven track record of several billion years. Humanity, in contrast, is new and frail, and our many cultures are just a tiny part of this brief human history. The modern defensive walls we have set against nature be they engineered, medical, military, or religious seem designed more to maintain the illusion that we are in control and in a privileged position than to resolve the underlying tension of our own insignificance and our inevitable failure to overcome death.The "other" is surely a threat. Life is fatal. But I am worried that the walls we have built to keep us safe preclude our participation in the world that surrounds us. To hold to our internal "us" identity, we reject the external signs of our similarity to the foreign "other." Trapped behind the security line between nature and culture, humanity stagnates in a swamp of self-reference, where the signs from without are discounted and the signs from within overblown.What possibilities await if we consider that we are the "other" as we are "us"? We are trained to take comfort within the walls of culture, but I am afraid those walls, like all others, are failing. Insomuch as these walls reinforce our detachment from nature, we are less for our desperate efforts to shore them up.

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Landscape Architecture PROFILE: BOUNDARY MAKERLandscape ArchitectureJanuary 2008By Marty CarlockDevotee of stone Jonathan Piaseeki, ASLA, tells how he builds walls, makes art, and tries to respect the land.Jonathan Piasecki, ALSA, has a mystical feeling about walls. At the Bronze-Age roots of our own Culture, he says, the wall was "a fusion of stone, earth, and ritual," the place where raw and perhaps hostile nature was held at bay. Basic to Piasecki's work is an attitude of respect for the earth and for stones as the bones of the earth.From the beginning of a project, Piasecki, approaches the design of a landscape backwards. Instead of imposing his plan on the land, he walks around a site, gets an idea of "what the landscape wants to be," and to some extent improvises as he works. Piasecki muses, "If you draw first, the drawing tells you what it's going to be. If you just go out and look, there's a process of discovering what [the landscape] could be."He does some other unorthodox things. He makes his own art from the materials he finds on site. You won't find fountains, benches, or cherubs sculpted elsewhere and plopped into place. For him and for users of the place, the art works as directional signs and place markers.Most radically, he builds his own stonework. Sometimes he has help, but when lie's working on a project he's on site, dust and dirty fingernails and all, cranking come-alongs and working tractor front loaders. He's particular about the way he wants his dry walls built. "There are not many landscape architects who do stone. Masonry peoplc know how to set it but don't have the design thing. It's pretty rare to fuse the two." Piasecki takes satisfaction in laying every stone himself. The macho component to wrestling with and subduing tons of rock is balanced by his creativity.Working with a vision of how he wants a wall to look, he adjusts as he goes along, trusting his instincts to know when he has it right. To break the stone to the sizes he wants, he uses traditional tools such as chisels. He uses a transit to set the level of the wall at both ends, but he refuses to string mason's lines to make sure it's straight. "I do it by eye. When it's not perfect, it looks like it's been there forever. It's very freeing when you don't have to make it super tight. I try to get to the fluidity of the stone."A representative sample of his work is in Lenox, Massachusetts. He calls it an Ordovician bench, because the stone he's using is from that geologic era. He's dug no foundation; digging would have killed the 50-foot pines and hemlocks the wall runs alongside. The walls are laid dry but bonded, stones of each course set at right angles to the one below and overlapping the seams. "My walls are very tough," Piasecki points out. "Rough walls in the stone building trade are looked down upon. I think this rough work is better. It's alive."To avoid tree trunks, the wall zigs around them, creating a dozen right angles. Occasionally he makes a notch, a seat in the wall "to hang out on." The corners are anchored with two-ton blocks, creatively placed, so not every corner is square and true; some are set back,leaving small seats. On a front corner, one block is sculpted with parallel vertical cuts Piasecki sliced with his diamond saw, then partially chipped out to create striped shadows. Every rock is positioned so the face with the most beautiful patterning shows.His tractor will handle 800 pounds. With a come-along strapped to trees, lie can crank and tow rocks to where he wants them. He uses straps around the stones, too, so he won't mark them. When he gets a rock about where he wants it, he levers it into place with rollers and a big pry bar. "People who came to watch called me Archimedes."Piasecki's wife worries about the fact that he usually works alone. He shrugs. "I'm 40 years old and I'm pretty careful. But I'm not good at managing other people. Landscape architecture always means field adjustments; that way you can tie it into the land and the people you are working for. I lay every stone and make every adjustment."He finds the physicality of the work welcome. "You never can stop. Your musculature gets accustomed to that work. If you stop, you lose that." His advice for those who want to do what he does: "They're going to have to learn stone masonry, stone manipulation. It's the very definition of a hard thing to learn."Of his free-form style, Piasecki says, "At first it was fate." Piasecki's art place markers began when clients in Harlemville, New York, asked him to cut a crosscountry ski trail up a ridge, through woods. "Then they asked, 'How can we make sure we don't get lost? Could you put some orange dots on the trees?' I thought about it and I said, 'No. Why don't I make you stuff?'" The "stuff" he made is very subtle. Here it's simply a rock cairn. There it may be a bladelike stone wedged between two tree trunks or a pile of rocks cupped by the trunks of five oaks that grew from a single root.Some will not last long. One marker is simply a stack of saplings. Another is a lattice Piasecki fabricated in his studio from twigs and hung from a branch. "If they deteriorate, I'll redo. Or sometimes not. With these clients, my thinking was, they need help getting around the woods for awhile. Then things could deteriorate and it wouldn't matter." But he goes on to say, "I don't think it's going to work out like that. I think they're getting fond of the sculpture."Piasecki takes pleasure in the fact that it's hard to tell his markers from ancient ones lie finds in these woodsmythic stone piles or natural outcroppings. The point is to get people in the habit of looking at what's around them."Working in the woods, I thought, not many people see my work. But one day I was here and there were a whole bunch of kids from the Hawthorne Valley School. The teachers bring kids from there to get them puzzled about the woods. I had no idea so many people saw [my sculptures]."For several hundred yards toward the end of the trail, just before it exits into a meadow, Piasecki's art goes spooky. Flat stones, dozens of them, hang from trees. There's something about them that looks like the human shape - they are crudely carved to have shoulders and a head. Their maker calls them "manitous," the Algonquin word for the spirit that permeates the world.He found the first one. "I was looking for stones in one of these piles, and I found this one that seemed to have a presence. I felt it had been made to represent something spiritual. I started reading, doing research." He learned that such shaped stones were not uncommon. "We can never know what it means," he says "because these people [who created them] are gone." Piasecki's manitous hang from wires around the "neck." It grows on the viewer gradually that these stones represent dead people. It's decidedly unsettling. This installation is the artist's tribute to the aboriginal people who once lived here.At the end of the ski trail is a wide, mowed swath through meadow grasses. The path leads past a dug pond and into a woodsy bog. Piasecki says nobody knew the swamp was there. He built a brief boardwalk meandering into it, past sedge hummocks.Exploring the woods, he found a huge hickory tree that had been blasted by lightning and had the core burned our of it. Its canopy was still alive. Completely awed, Piasecki built a crescent wall of rock partway around it, taking care that the only place to sit is in the middle, staring at the cavity of the tree. He thinks of it as a shrine tree. What he has done encourages passersby to pause and consider the forces of life.After finding tile shrine tree, Piasecki says, "I wanted to find more big trees I could engage, could interact with." Near the meadow he encountered a huge oak and decided to people it with something very different from the eerie manitous. The branches of this tree are hung with something like many-armed stick figures, the arms made of hollow phragmites reeds that whistle in the wind. Where the shrine tree invokes reverence, the whistling oak is playful.HOW DOES PIASECKI get people to buy his "stuff'?"I had to do more selling at first," he remembers. "Now people come to me. It's pretty obvious from my portfolio what I do. I tell them what my ideas are, and either they're down with it right away, or they're marginal, or they fire me."If he feels the need for a change and they don't, he'll turn down the job. "There was a woman who wanted me to plant purple loosestrife (an invasive wetlands plant) because she wanted color in her meadow." He couldn't persuade her to go with anything else. "I quit."In business as Golden Bough Landscape Architecture in West Stockbridge, Massachusetts, for 10 years, Piasecki says, "This is the first year I've scheduled the year ahead. I have more work than I can ever do." He often puts in a day or two on one job, then a day or two on another. "I get it done," he says. In the second-home-packed Berkshires, "I work with people who aren't there."Born near the Canadian border in Chateaugay, New York, Piasecki studied biogeochemistry-"forest ecology, climate science," he explainsat Cornell University. Because "I don't think I could work inside very long," he took a job that paid $3 an hour at a solid waste facility in Vermont, hated that, and became a tree pruner and arborist. Working with a landscape architect during that time, he thought, "I can do this." He applied to Harvard Graduate School of Design and earned an MLA.Piasecki has just been chosen as artist in residence by the Pittsfield (Massachusetts) Storefront Collaborative, which has charged him with filling empty shop windows with his art. The art is ephemeral arid edgy. It grows out of Piasecki's love of his materials: stone, twigs, reeds, knotty branches, and scraps of weathered wood. "I'm primarily a landscape architect, but I make things. So they're sculpture I get flashes of inspiration, start work-ing on it. I might do a drawing, but I'm a lousy drawer. Then I build those things. I get a feeling; I know when it's good. I don't think of myself primarily as an artist, but there's artistry in what I do."Artists are fearful of making their own stuffthat's what artisans do. Making stuff sets up a different relationship. When you make something, you use it in a very different way."Outdoors, his onsite art is kin to earthworks art and inevitably brings to mind sculptor Andy Goldsworthy's work. "He and I are subtly different," Piasecki says. "I've had a developing relationship with his work. First, I thought it was so beautiful. Then I got jealous. Now I think my work is different, but I owe him an enormous debt. Without him I wouldn't be able to do these things. No one would give it any value."Not all Piasecki's work falls into the earth-art category, but it all involves stone these days. He's just completed a courtyard in Troy, New York, in a building owned by a restoration architect. Piasecki had to do it all by hand-the doorway to the Courtyard is too small to admit machines. He was lucky. He dug into the ground in the yard and found bluestone, buried after a building was destroyed by fire in the 19th century. So as he prefers to do, he was able to use material found on the site.Piasecki spent a year between 2004 and 2005 at the American Academy in Rome as a recipient of the Prince Charitable Trust Rome Prize Fellowship in Landscape Architecture. There he studied archaic, Etruscan and Roman boundary walls. Piasecki thinks his work wasn't changed by the Rome experience, but, he muses, "There are a lot of different Romes to see. If you dig down in the soil in Rome, you go back in time. You can literally see the rapport the masons had with the earth. You can see how they reused stones from earlier buildings. In America, we throw stuff away. In Rome they reused everything."I think the impact of what I'm doing is important," he declares. "I'm in a chain of people making boundaries that goes back millennia."

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House and Garden JON PIASECKI THE NATURALISTHouse and GardenJune 2007M.O.When James Schamus, the CEO of Focus Features, wanted to create a path for his family through the woods in Columbia County, New York, he called on landscape architect and artist Jon Piasecki, who had worked on Schamus's garden. It was a rewarding choice. Piasecki has studied forest ecology, landscape architecture, and, equally important, Bronze Age stonework and earth magic. Working on the path, he discovered small piles of rocks and scattered Native American artifacts. Inspired by these mysterious piles and the rich history of the land, he created sculptures from materials found on-site. Large mounds of stones stacked about three feet high, a wood sculpture suspended between two trees, and a mobile of about a hundred small rocks dangling from branches mark the hilly path. Encountering them as you climb can be slightly unnerving. These objects are at once strikingly beautiful and a bit eerie a not so subtle reminder that even though you may be walking by yourself, you are not alone.Piasecki's projects, through his landscape architecture firm Golden Bough in western Massachusetts, fuse all of his passions. Practicing what he calls a "do no harm approach," the enthusiastic Piasecki, who won the prestigious Rome Prize in 2004, plants mostly natives and almost never uses heavy machinery."I let nature be my guide," he says of his organic process, which often comes to fruition while he's outside in the garden. On the woody path animals and plants, and especially history, are all around you. This is exactly what Piasecki hopes to invoke through his work. "I want to connect people ecologically and culturally to the land," lie says. "I want to give new life to forgotten things."

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Berkshire Living DOWN TO EARTH: LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT JON PIASECKI'S UNIQUE VISION OF NATURE AND CULTUREBerkshire LivingJune 2006By Sheryl LechnerLandscape architect Jon Piasecki once described himself as "just a Polish guy with a dump truck." True, he is the primary builder for his small firm, Golden Bough Landscape Architecture, and he does lots of digging, tree planting and stone cutting. But, comfortable as he is clad in rugged canvas Carhartt pants and work gloves, hauling rocks uphill, Piasecki, who holds degrees in forest science from Cornell and in landscape architecture from Harvards Graduate School of Design, is fluent in topics ranging from ancient cultures and religious history to architecture and ecology. He can discourse effortlessly on the symbolism of ancient architectural detailing, or how the innate power of the land offers humankind a way to encounter mortality.Recently, his intellectual interests landed Piasecki, 39, in elite company. In May 2004, he was one of thirty American artists and scholars to receive the prestigious Rome Prize, awarded annually by the American Academy in Rome. The Prize allowed him and his family to live for a year in Rome, where Piasecki explored his fascination with the rapport between nature and culture, and created sculpture. Back in the Berkshires since August 2005, Piasecki has since modified his dump truck description. Planning to convert the truck to run on biodiesel fuel, he now says, he's "a guy with a truck and 'tude."You really can't blame the guy for a bit of Attitude. Those who win the Rome prize competition in landscape architecture are typically with big-city firms; it was highly unlikely that the coveted prize would go to a relative unknown, who runs his company from his West Stockbridge, Massachusetts, home with a smattering of equipment and employees. In addition, at the American Academy, Piaseckis sculpture was well received by museum curators, and, last fall, one of his pieces was shown in Manhattan at the opening of a new Fendi store, an event that attracted movie stars and paparazzi. Piasecki found it surreal.Perhaps more surreal is that after a heady year of hobnobbing with the intelligentsia, the rich and the famous, and the endorsement of his ideas, Piasecki has returned to the down-to-earth Berkshire work that is the laboratory for those ideas. Landscape, he believes, has a cultural depth: Culture is literally embedded in the land, and the intimate landscape each person inhabits, the place he or she knows best, is the place to gain knowledge of the past. In this context, says Piasecki, "People's backyards become incredibly significant."Piasecki works on a wide variety of projects, each of which evidences his trademark restraint and respect for the native landscape. He explains, "I am trying to find a way to connect the people who experience my work with the intense wonder I feel in relation to the land."One of Piaseckis clients is Gigi Wilmers, who owns a stately early-19th century Stockbridge house on two acres of property, half of which is a woodlot with a small wetland. "I find working with Jon extremely rewarding because he has a real sense of place and is very sensitive to the specific site and its special environment," Wilmers says. "I like the way he works with the historical setting and, when possible, complements rather than disposing of what's already there."Piasecki graded and established lawn around Wilmers home, and planted two Princeton elms. Next to the house, he built a stone terrace set off by a low stone wall. He created a path between house and driveway using large, flat Massachusetts schist, which he cut by hand in irregular patterns that resemble an outsized jigsaw puzzle. Since its installation, moss and wild thyme have volunteered in the narrow gaps between the drop-dead gorgeous stone-work.Piasecki yielded to Wilmers desire for a few small beds of cultivated flowers, but turned the task into an archeological dig, unearthing such items as horseshoes and old glass. For her part, Wilmers ceded control of her woods to Piasecki."She discovered that the best part of this whole thing for her is the woods," he says, "because it's alive."The collaboration was a learning opportunity for Wilmers, who says Piasecki helped her clarify her feelings about the property. She wanted to be able to walk in the woods and feel connected to nature without having to worry too much about picking up Lyme-carrying ticks from the underbrush. Piasecki did little more than clear brushespecially invasive non-native plants that were threatening native speciesto create a faint trace of a path. Rather than removing downed trees, he suggested they be left for wildlife habitat."From my perspective, there's no better design for this than restraining my hand," he says. "Most people don't understand that. The beauty and poetry of this place is a swamp. It's not Jon Piasecki."Piasecki believes that land has both cultural depth and ecological importance. His message to clients is that there are layers of meaning and knowledge in the land, embedded like fossils, there for those who take time to decipher the clues. Spending a year in Rome was perfectly suited to his interests, since there the ancient history is revered and celebrated, heavily documented, and very present. Ironically, Piasecki says he found Roman history to be much more ambiguous than he had realized."We know almost as little about the ancient past as we do about the future," Piasecki says. "To me this opened the past as a valid realm of artistic exploration." His initial proposal for the American Academy was to do a study of the ancient rituals associated with the sanctification of boundary stones, but he found limited information. So, he moved on to reading about the history of Greek religious rites, in which animals might be sacrificed, dismembered, and reassembled. As a result of this study, he played with ways of using modern sculpture in similar ways, collecting debris from around the Academy grounds -- situated on the Janiculum, Rome's highest hill -- then taking the material apart and reassembling it in symbolic ways. A log is broken apart, then put back together pierced with numerous red-tipped sticks, evoking arrows, as if to represent the vanquished enemy, like a war trophy at a battlefield."With my [sculptural] work I tried to animate wood and stone debris in such a way that people who entered my studio could begin to feel the primal force I feel in the land. My premise was that instinctively some of the power of ancient land magic is still perceivable today and a prime place for artistic investigation," Piasecki explained in a summary of his experience written for the Academy.How does this pertain to the Berkshires? We tend, Piasecki says, to forget that this land -- as with all land -- has an ancient history, and also a Native American history that predates European settlement. Some clues to the lands cultural history are buried, like arrowheads that surface as farmers plow their fields. Other clues are in plain view. On a knoll near the center of Stockbridge stands a 20-foot spire of stone. A monument that English settlers erected to mark a Native American burial site, it recalls the towns origin as a Mahican Indian settlement along the Housatonic River, made up of groups gathered by Reverend John Sergeant. Now the area is a golf course, its history erased, except for the stone spire.Another of Piaseckis projects is a 90-acre property in Columbia County, owned by James Schamus, an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and film producer, known for his work with director Ang Lee. Schamus asked Piasecki to landscape around the six-year-old house and to make the forested mountainside behind it safe for his wife and young children to explore.Around the foundations of the house, Piasecki planted a simple hedge of native hornbeam, and he defined adajcent areas with simple plantings, such as the blueberry bushes that form a courtyard as you approach from the driveway. "The real show is what's around us," explains Piasecki, gesturing to the spectacular meadow and mountain views from the hilltop clearing. No need to draw the eye away from that with ornamental plants, he notes, adding, "I'm real proud of this work. It's very restrained."In the forest, rather than simply cut a trail and mark it with blazes, Piasecki and his staff followed hunting trails and deer paths, finding vernal pools and old stone piles. (New England is dotted with these piles, he says, and no one is precisely sure of their origins.) To guide the family through their woods, Piasecki made sculptural markers, using materials found on the site. He restacked some stone piles, and created others: rocks piled within the hollow of a multi-trunked oak tree; a chunk of quartz wedged into the crook of a hornbeam; downed branches shaped into a rustic bridge between two trailside trees.Schamus says that his children and guests love the mystery of these markers. "They're always searching the forest for clues as to where the path leads next, and what the path will reveal as it unfolds," he says. "Some of our favorite markers have started to blend back into the landscape, decomposing, or becoming overgrown with moss. Someday Jon's work will quietly merge back into the landscape and the history it comes out of."In some places, the markers are distinctly less subtle. Piasecki likes to play on people's primal fears of forests, which were historically seen as places full of evil, secrets and death (think fairy tales). In the deepest, darkest section of trail in Schamus' woods, Piasecki hung a series of sculpted stones, dangling from tree branches and loaded with cultural references. These stones guide hikers, but, says Piasecki, they are "also meant to make you wonder, 'What the hell is going on here?'" Schamus, undeterred, is clearly a huge fan."Most great artists tend to want to impose their vision on nature and on the traditions out of which their art emerges. Jon does the opposite: While being totally original, he teases out the history and ecology of the landscape he works in," he says.For Piasecki, helping people connect to their land is more than an academic exercise or a way to make a livingit may be a matter of life and death. In the Western world, he says, people think that our technology and culture have controlled the land. We hold this delusion at our own perilas each tsunami, earthquake, or disease outbreak underscores." Unless we change this view, he asserts, we may go the way of ancient Rome.

Departures Magazine

Janus Stone Sculpture by Jon Piasecki

Departures Magazine

May/June 2006

Departures Magazine

Press

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