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Internalizing the Land: Backyard and Identity Formation



This project began while photographing the remains of my childhood tree house. It has been twenty years ago now since my father and I built the trapezoidal platform in the apple tree at the edge of the forest. I was eleven and remember feeling a little old as a girl getting her first tree house while simultaneously developing crushes on boys in my class. I stood there now in front of this tree on a wet Wisconsin November afternoon with only the traces of a tree house left. I would have to refer to photos to see what actually remained as my memory has a tendency to fill in the structure that I knew so well. I do remember soggy bits of 2x4 adhered to the tree trunk where the ladder was. A few bricks were piled near the base of the tree. Was that my doing? I don’t remember when the house was abandoned, or when it was dismantled. These photographs of a non-descript tree on a grey day hung in my studio and kept pulling my attention back. There was something there in the ruins at the base of that tree - something had taken place for me in that location. I began to investigate just what was so important to me about that very ordinary piece of midwestern terrain.

I can picture almost every square meter of the area where the tree house sat. This place appears as no-place in particular, yet I knew the curves of the hill in the back, and became familiar with nearly every tree. The specific interaction of a few trees registered as landmarks, and spaces created by partially felled trees became places to burrow and make “home” for the day.

I’m carrying this piece of land somewhere between my intestines and throat. I feel I am made from that swath of forest between the mowed backyard and the gravel quarry lake over the hill. This wooded territory remained undefined and overlooked as it was between destinations. This between-place began to pique my interest and it became my territory the exact borders of which I never knew, yet I always felt when I was nearing the end of my territory due to a lack of familiarity. Although I don’t know how much time I actually spent there, in my memory it is the site of the formation of my connection to the land, to place, and to myself.

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The Inhabited Garden: Finding Home in the Outside Lands



In an effort to investigate the place of my connection to land, I chose a site within Golden Gate Park to function as a surrogate for that initial stomping ground: a territory for identity formation, development of the senses, and exposure to a conflation of the natural and cultural.

The area of the park west of 19th avenue, away from tourist destinations functions more as a local backyard, and a kind of illegal urban commons that some call home. The specific areas I am focusing on are the undefined spaces, the liminal zones that have grown their own histories and definitions through use and inhabitation. These are small stands of trees, areas off jogging paths where there is no defined way to enter or experience the area. For most, these areas function as scenery, and are rarely penetrated.

The Park has served as San Francisco’s collective backyard since its inception in 1866. With a boom in business and population, American society sought a balance between the urban and natural worlds, and felt a yearning for the simpler past. There was clearly a need for a remote space to provide an escape from work lives, and industrialization. The park soon became an antidote to the citizens’ materialistic ambitions.

The land that makes up the park is part of what was originally called the Outside Lands, an expanse of wind blown sand dunes considered undesirable and uninhabitable. What made the park the green expanse it is now was largely water, lots of topsoil, human labor, and a plant from every country in the world, except Bolivia (Pollock). Like most backyards, the verdant park we now know is a fantastical human construct, a natural fiction.

Day 1: Obscuring Reason

I enter the park off of 19th avenue and begin to follow one of the inroads. The air is clear and crisp and bright. What I see looks like the Disney nature scenes I used to attempt to inhabit while looking through my red Viewmaster. The vivid intensity of the trees and sky was overwhelming. I remember being slightly afraid of, if not intimidated by the trees upon first moving to Northern California. The size and visual intensity of the cypress trees was something new to me. A little concerned about and intrigued by this irrational fear, I left the park to do some research. I was relieved to read of forests’ long symbolic history.



Forests have traditionally had a strong association with the subconscious, the mysterious, and the unknown. Entering the dark forest is a threshold symbol. It represents the soul entering the perils of the unknown, a quest for the secrets of nature, and the spiritual world which man must penetrate to find the meaning. Common children’s tales (such as Snow White, Goldilocks, or Hansel & Gretel) reveal one way these associations are perpetuated. Jung maintains that that the sylvan terrors that figure so prominently in these children’s tales symbolize the perilous aspects of the subconscious, or its tendency to devour and obscure reason (Fraim).

Mark*, a man who has lived in a hole dug in the ground in one of the park’s meadows talks about the fear he has felt in the park, and its forests in particular.

“It’s just a neat place all together, but it’s scary. It really is, because I’ve never been afraid in the woods in my life, even when I was a little kid. And I’ve traveled all over the country following the Dead. I’ve been in a lot of different woods, but here … its like, um, it’s some unknown fear, it’s like fear of the unknown or whatever. I can’t explain it... I don’t know.”

*names have been changed to preserve anonymity

Day 2: Psychic Weapons

Walking on MLK drive and thinking again about fear in the forest. I am remembering an unusual element in my suburban backyard. On my outings I would find things such as an arrangement of sticks for a fire never lit, a red flannel blanket, and a shelter fashioned from young saplings and tarps. Happening upon these camps brought a shock and a sudden sense of being watched. I felt he was omnipresent. I never knew where I might encounter him. He seemed to know this place as well or better than I did. I never got a good look at him, but saw him retreating into the woods one day at dusk. I wondered who he was, and why he was living in our backyard. I wanted to see his face, and wondered why I had been warned of him.

The tree house of my childhood functioned both as a sanctuary and a fort. In defense against enemies imagined and real, I constructed a set of weapons. Among them were a bow and several arrows made of the straightest sticks available whittled to the sharpest points I could manage. The bow was fashioned from a curved stick and a rubber band. The slingshot was similarly made using a Y-shaped stick with pebbles for ammunition. I hid these weapons in a hole dug at the base of the tree, covered with a piece of plywood. This defense system was completely illogical and non-functional, as I was unable to access them from my advantaged position in the tree. Perhaps more importantly, the bow didn’t shoot the arrows with enough force to deter anyone. I realize now what I was doing was creating a set of psychic or symbolic weapons. For me they functioned as a defense system insofar as I knew they were there. That I suppose was enough. That representation of security, preparedness and independence was just as useful to me buried as it was up in the tree house positioned for fire.

Day 3: The Edge of Certainty

I had just taken a “water sample” from one of the green ponds in the park, meaning I had just filled a used water bottle with the bright green liquid, trying not to fall in. I planned to look at it with my new digital microscope to see if I could reveal new layers of the park. I was walking toward the road when I was asked, “You a scientist?”

I probably did look like a scientist more than an artist. It was not the first time I had been asked about science in reference to my work. What I am after is an aspect of science that was shamed and buried during the Enlightenment. I was investigating in avoidance of answers; trying to find a place to dwell for a moment, in what I can only call wonder.

“Since the Enlightenment, wonder has become a disreputable passion in workaday science, redolent of the popular, the amateurish, and the childish. Scientists now reserve expressions of wonder for their personal memoirs, not their professional publications. They may acknowledge wonder as a motivation, but they no longer consider it part of doing science” (Daston, 14-15). I am engaging in a constant observation that delves beyond the scientific in the sense that I am not bound by hypotheses or limits of reason. These experiments, or encounters are more in the service of dwelling more fully in my relationship to my surroundings. Most often, they are attempts at connection with or knowledge of something that isn’t fully knowable. Jung writes of our inability to perceive anything fully or comprehend anything completely:

He can see, hear, touch and taste; but how far he sees, how well he hears, what his touch tells him and what he tastes depend upon the number and quality of his senses. These limit his perception of the world around him. By using scientific instruments he can partly compensate for the deficiencies of his senses. But the most elaborate apparatus cannot do more than bring distant or small objects within range of his eyes or make faint sounds more audible. No matter what instruments he uses, at some point he reaches the edge of certainty beyond which conscious knowledge cannot pass (p.21).

It is this edge of certainty that I find most compelling.

Day 4: Stargazing and the Endangerment of Wonder

"The more we come to dwell in an explained world, a world of uniformity and regularity, a world without possibility of miracles, the less we are able to encounter anything but ourselves"
-Neil Everden The Social Creation of Nature

We rarely delight in the idea of not knowing. On a recent trip to a prestigious observatory, a group of us listened as a lead astronomer reluctantly admitted that there was something not so amazing about these high-powered instruments of observation. Standing dwarfed by a giant telescope and its accessories, this man candidly confessed that as his knowledge of the skies increased, his sense of wonder and enjoyment waned.

Although this inverse relationship is hardly law, I think it is not entirely uncommon. This shift in thinking during the Enlightenment has been described as a shift from the extraordinary (sensory impact) to the ordinary (rationalizing nomenclature). What again is the value in stargazing? Is it always most fruitful to seek fact from experience? The suspension in the moment between discovery and explanation is for me the richest territory. When we venture out in search of nothing in particular we are led to inquire about the things we perceive.

My method of inquiry today is not to go to a book or the Internet for the answer. The answers to my questions would not be there anyway: What would the wind look like if its movement were traced? What does it sound like underground? How far would I have to dig in this very spot to hit the original sand dunes of the park? I make a list and am off to the studio to make these questions visible.

Day 5: Educating the Skin

Lupine, cypress, eucalyptus. These are the only three plant names I know as I look around. I begin to get disgruntled about how I am so severed from any intimate knowledge of the land, knowledge that used to be passed through generations. Then I realize two things: I was the one who moved to California away from any accumulated knowledge of the Midwest, and I was standing among a combination of plants that didn’t exist together anywhere in the world, except right here. No one with any indigenous knowledge of one plant would necessarily know the next.

I’m reminded of Paul Tavana, the oldest by at least one generation of four South African woodcarvers I worked with. He was the last one in that group that had any knowledge of the local plants and their names and practical uses. The younger men explained that no one in their generation knew these things. Paul showed us how to mix the sap of two trees to create a rubbery substance.

Watching him I could see that this was part of his bodily knowledge. ‘Ichi una’, or skin knowledge is what the Cashinahua of Eastern Peru call it. It is the knowledge of the world one acquires through ones skin, through the feel of the sun, the wind, the rain and the forest. Skin knowledge is what enables the Cashinahua to find their way through their jungle environment and locate the animals that they hunt for food (Howes, p. 28).

The tradition of attributing some form of intelligence to the sentient body stretches back to antiquity. It was only with the introduction of body-mind dualism of Rene Descartes that such bodily ways of knowing became alien to mainstream Western thought. A wise person among the Cashinahua is described as:

Their hands know: they are skilled workers. Their skin knows; they have an extensive and intimate knowledge of their physical surroundings. Through the activities of their eye spirits they have knowledge of the spirit world. Knowledge of their mortality and immortality resides in their genitals. Their liver provides them with a full range of emotions. A truly knowledgeable person is one whose whole body knows. (Kensiger 1995: 245) (Howes, p.29).

One of my strongest elementary school memories is sitting on a large rock on the playground beating many harvested dandelion stalks. I remember having a half-belief that I would eventually transform this material into something completely new, and unexpected. I was trying to know this plant, and its material in a new way, to get to its essence. I wonder now if I was fulfilling a desire to engage in the kind of relationship that was no longer common in my time and place in the world.

Day 6: Tactile Desire

I feel compelled to stop next to a blue agave plant and touch its smooth sturdy leaves covered in a fine white film. Each leaf shows the imprint of its closest neighbor – a record of how the plant grew before it opened. Why is it so difficult to resist touching some plants? What exactly is it that I think I will gain from that additional thread of experience? In part, I am motivated as a sculptor/object-maker/tactile visual artist to constantly add to my understanding of how materials behave. Yet there is another level of the urge to touch things that requires an initial pause, a gathering of all one’s sensory attention. These are objects that carry significant meaning because of scarcity, rarity, age, historical significance, or contact with a famed person or place.

In these cases, touch helps to make things real. This urge to touch historical objects is a drive to commune with the past, as if affirming the reality of history, and passing of time. One man said of touching the Liberty Bell that it felt that he was grounding himself electrically, closing a circuit by making contact with the abstract notion of freedom. The urge to touch plants I pass by in the park has an element of this as well, this desire to commune with the place we came from and are going, and so make the present more real.

The urge to touch is a universally human urge that gets us out of our heads, and into the world. Intellectually understanding a concept offers only one kind of knowledge. However, some things are inadequately held in ideas and words. When presented with an object imbued with meaning, it does indeed serve us to touch. Touch can help save us from intellectual errors by fracturing everything we thought we understood. It is unpredictable what we are going to feel. This bodily contact can surprise us; pull the rug out from under our intellectual understanding, and conceptual structures.

One day when I was ten, my mom came home from work with a brain in a bucket. My dad had brought it home from the lab at work for her to study. It was a rare opportunity to examine a real human brain. She was excited and solemn all at once. I was there when she placed it atop a black garbage bag on the basement floor by the drain. My parents were careful to explain that this was a real brain that used to be in a real person, and this was what made them who they were. They emphasized that this was a privilege and we must respect this person's remains. I participated, examining the pieces sliced into cross section. Those few minutes were very quiet. The quality of the air changed. Or maybe the way sound traveled in the air that changed. Or maybe I was getting faint.

Day 7: From Object to Tool

I’m in the park pulling a collection of implements in a cardboard cart behind me. Since it is a beautiful Sunday, there are all kinds of people here, as if they all crawled out of the bushes, or just materialized. An older couple lying in the grass close to the pond, people on obscure footpaths, groups of young people crowding benches. Standing in bunches. I am happy to have a friend with me who understands my interests. It made it easier to pretend that my cardboard cart was just as normal as a German Shepard. It actually felt surprisingly natural to feel the subtle weight of the tools in the cart rather than having them hover around waiting, immaterial. Today a set of objects are becoming tools as “...it is only insofar as the object ceases to remain an object and becomes a medium, a vehicle for impressions and expression, that it can be used as an instrument or tool” (Grosz, p.80). Through activating these objects it completes their life cycle from initial conception in the park, to materializing in the studio, to returning to site to be implemented and perhaps documented.



These tools function to externalize, and communicate. They speak as much of their futility as they do of their utility. Although all have their specialized purposes, ultimately any one is inadequate to provide answers. They offer no precise readings, printouts, or analyses, but instead illuminate, or add a subtle depth of experience so that we may more fully inhabit that expansive inch between suspended body and earth.