Lee Deigaard

An installation of photographs and sculptures with LED lights, conduit pipe, tires, pilings, and tree parts draws from a long term body of work inspired by a small corner of Georgia a stone’s throw from the interstate. I am drawn to the incidental witnessing and the compulsive recording of a place in all seasons over years, for love of it and fear it may be lost.
These woods are the watershed for what flows under the highway and the acoustical shed for what flows along it.
The interstate is an escape, a human migration corridor, and an inexorable barrier to animal movement.
The woods, too, are an escape. Roaming their contours, I feel the animals holding their breath. A sense of peace and of trespass are partnered.Crusher run is ground limestone finer than gravel, coarser than silt. It’s found in creek beds and road beds and under asphalt. My great-grandfather built roads including, in his off-time, the narrow tracks through these woods, looked after now by my father who moves the fallen trees. Wild animals also use these roads as thoroughfares. Scent trails of movement keyed to geography but separated by time overlap like shadows. Movements overlaid one upon the other make a topography of experience, embedded adjacency, and near misses. The sounds of wood cicadas mingle with grinding truck gears.

Trees fall into the clefts of companion trees who bear their weight until a heavy rain looses their root balls and down they both go.

In the way a river delta resembles a tree or a slice of the brain’s hippocampus resembles a tree, the branching of arteries and feeder routes in the human vascular system form a map of roads and highways that intersect, bisect, transverse.
Highways are arteries.
Trees are essential circulatory systems. These trees, these woods are entwined in mine.

In any circulatory system there are occlusions. The tree does its best to grow around them. New growth emerges from a stump. On the operating table the surgeon inserts a stent. A tire rolls off the interstate and floats downstream where a raccoon investigates its caches. Trees draw their reciprocal forms in shadows on the ground.