This romance with nature has spiritual affinities and signifies a process of idealization in which both mind and nature are fundamental means of capturing the essence found in things. Stahlecker's work includes echoes of Coleridge, a shared allegiance to organicism and metaphors derived from principles of growth and change. But beyond the metaphorical allusions there is the physical presence of the materials, the tangible proof of the artificer's invention. In this material world one senses the transformative gesture in Stahlecker's work--inner bark being transmuted by the rite of "fire and water, coaxed and tamed by hands and nature, love and energy."2 Her trees levitate in space, the slightest movement makes them quiver, and light pulses through the diaphanous white fronds, exposing their interior structure. This world of light, ephemeral shadows, and soaring sensation, contrasts with its opposite, a sublunar dimension--conical funnels spiraling out of black trunks with blood red veins. In this realm of Miltonian "darkness visible,"3 one senses density, gravity, emergence, and arterial flow--the slow dance of life becoming conscious. In the center of the room, with its commingling of white and black trees, one discovers the fulcrum of expectations. Opposites come together here as generating and sensual impulses, giving structural integrity to the installation. The installation's architectonic organization lies beneath these metaphorical affinities. Groups of trees in clusters of three stand separate yet emanate from the central node, and numerical arrangements, patterns, and structures arise. Branching, explosive, and spiral patterns underlie these geometric configurations and are reminiscent of Y-shaped, columnar forms used to support roofs. These architectural associations are multi-functional in their efficiency and adaptability to a variety of spaces. One thinks of Antonio Gaudi's branched columns for his models of Sagrada Familia, Parc Guell, and his parabolic arches; Otto Frei's structural studies; and Gothic arches, resonant with feelings of being in nature's cathedral. Looking at the vaults overhead, one finds the geometer's handiwork, as two arcs come together from the same direction, terminating and using a common tangent to create the pointed tracery and aisles. These elements pull the eye not only upwards but also laterally, as if space and these columned trees could grow exponentially. Trees are pregnant with mythic allusions: as the pillars of heaven and as vehicles for shamans to traverse the distance between heaven and earth. According to the Kojiki, an uprooted tree with mirrors and cloth tributes hanging from its branches was revered as a temporary residence of the spirit of the deity, in ancient Japanese religious practices.4 From the tree as a symbol of fertility in ancient Mesopotamia to the biblical references of the Tree of Jesse, trees have struck a chord in the mythic imagination of humankind. Stahlecker uses myth and its relationship to the tree in a highly personalized way, transformed by virtue of her experiences, which have linked her to one of humankind's oldest witnesses. An archetypal motif, it has become her sign. In this sense, the mythical tree has been a key to understanding civilization's origins; a genealogical chart to which we are all connected. In the present, it has become a symbol of our ecologically stressed world. ------------------------------------------------------- As an undergraduate student at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, during the late 1970s, Stahlecker's course of study included ceramics, printmaking, and sculpture. She explored pop and feminist art concerns but papermaking became her dominant medium by 1976. During the early 1980s, in Chicago, the ideological issues surrounding feminism-- such as the domestic plight of women and their banal existences, clothing as a referential idiom of the body, and the attendant male gaze associated with voyeurism--were displaced for Stahlecker by a more mythical vision of womanhood and nature. When she did graduate work at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, majoring in sculpture, early childhood memories and her experiences living in the countryside northwest of Chicago emerged as a reference point to clarify her responses to the landscape. Nature took on a personal meaning as Stahlecker revisited those past sites of reverie. The land became a source of materials as much as a metaphor for Stahlecker's creative work. She began to seriously study past cultures, mythological and religious concepts, and practices of worship. She titled one of her first works to address the dualism of sacred and profane space Sanctuary (1980). She based this site-specific piece on an imaginary civilization that worshipped the cattail as its sacred center. This was a hypothetical premise about what a sacred space in such a totemic culture would look like. At the interfaces of nature, myth, and civilization one enters a different dimension--a space set aside from normal activities--that allows Stahlecker's narrative to exist. Sacred and profane space is now a constant leitmotif in many of her works. Studying under Timothy Barrett, Stahlecker learned the craft of Japanese papermaking and paper's archival and structural properties. She travelled to Japan in 1983 to expand her knowledge of traditional techniques. While in the village of Kurodani, whose primary commercial activity is papermaking, she began to explore the subtleties of the materials and processes of papermaking. Traditional papermaking requires a great deal of physical activity; the process is tedious, requiring long and strenuous hours. Once fully engaged in papermaking, the maker and materials operate in tandem to such an extent that the unconscious takes over. As Stahlecker sees it, the artist does not "make" paper but, instead, helps it materialize from the vat's "cool, clean water...swirling and cloud-like" creating a "fresh, wet, fragile skin...invisible, vulnerable...transformed...tough yet delicate...dead yet very much alive as paper."5 At these moments in papermaking, the activity is so all consuming that decentering occurs. While in Japan it became clear to Stahlecker that paper had found its way into all sectors of Japanese society. She was greatly interested in Shinto shrines and their use of paper to represent kami (spirits), and paper and straw to delineate their sacred precincts. These were meditative spaces and relate to Stahlecker's spatial sanctuaries, respites from the flux of daily activity. Back in Chicago that same year, she translated these experiences into an urban context. The simple act of looking at the sky with its patterns, light, and breezes proved to be an inspiration for her work for the next few years. The Eye of Reverence (1986) was the first major manifestation of architectural and natural forms linked to each other and to Japanese sources. Instead of using paper as a surface to paint on, Stahlecker incorporated the visual effects in the papermaking process itself. Light and color became an integral aspect of the paper, not an additive measure; walking through the space of this structure one experienced constant fluctuations. Coming to Alaska in 1986 added more fuel to Stahlecker's sensibilities. She responded to what she found in the area: subtle shades of purple during the winter solstice at Hatcher's Pass, lupine fields at Turnagain Arm, luminous skies at Cook Inlet and Susitna, and the ice blues at Matanuska Glacier. Responding to the Alaskan wilderness resulted in a model for a large scale project, never executed, Leave Just the Sky as Our Umbrella (1986). From this model, its reference to the wilderness, and its grandiose proportions, her response to nature took root in a more visible manner. By 1987, Stahlecker began to explore a different spatial arrangement in her installation, After a Clear-cut: Ghosts and Memories. Instead of being organized in a directional manner, as in Eye of Reverence, she arranged translucent white paper sheets and trees so that spectators would move in and around them. In this kinetically conceived space, the spectator created routes and relationships with the forms. Excluding artificial light, Stahlecker also allowed for the natural interplay of light and form. "Clear cut" is the lumber industry's term for cutting down whole stands of trees from a mountainside, not selective cutting but the total decimation of large areas of trees. Stahlecker's forms are literally and figuratively "memories and ghosts," the materialization of absence. As in a cemetery, they register as unmarked headstones, anonymous victims of the logger's chain saw. For the first time Stahlecker creates a boundary around an area and uses it to convey the terrain of sacred space in the context of a more complex interactive arrangement. Allusions to death, absence, and life emerge from Stahlecker's use of white. White is associated with mourning and death in Eastern cultures. But the absence of color does not negate white's life-giving properties. For Stahlecker, the experience of trees covered with snow has a rejuvenating meaning, too, a sense of an animate presence. This cyclical way of thinking is part of her organic sensibility; a dialectical operation of a mind constantly trying to achieve a synthesis. The Fragile Vessel (1988), with its gridded maplike longitudes and latitudes, resembles a panoramic global projection but does not develop the spatial concerns of After a Clear-cut. Its overwhelming scale reminds one of a Japanese or Chinese landscape, where figures become a minor note in the environment, part of nature but not dominant. Standing before this gently undulating, breathing skin, one felt both dwarfed by the presence of nature and connected to it. The recognition of earth's fragility, Stahlecker's concern for the preservation of nature, and her ecological stance are explicitly expressed in Between Eden and Armageddon (1989). She raises direct questions: "Why do we treat nature the way we do? If we can't find any resolution to the preservation of nature and humankind's accelerating destruction of her bounty, what is our legacy for future generations--the vision of Armageddon?" In experiencing this work, one passes through three phases, beginning with a paradisical reference. The first phase shows a world chaste and untouched by humankind. As one passes to the second phase, one enters a ritualized, sacred space, where order comes about out of a respect for nature. A sense of natural light fills this area and highlights the shifting seasonal cycles indicated by various color relationships hovering overhead in triangular frames. The upward fanlike gesture of these forms emerging from their attenuated trunks suggests deltas flowing into a sea of light, or the uplifted, ritualistic gesture of orantes, with their open hands and extended arms. The final phase, Armageddon, signifies an apocalyptic icon of our times. Based in part on the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound, Stahlecker expresses her pessimism. The hot colors flame upwards and the dark, lava-like oil spill flows below in this infernal "gate" towards a questionable future. This is a vision of things to come, a flattened out world that will no longer have the substance and feel of nature. Stahlecker makes personal statements, without an ideological or political agenda. Her position on world and ecological issues is a direct, heartfelt response. When she does address issues she usually refers to them implicitly, in a poetic vein. Uncharacteristically, she explicitly engages in editorializing in The Wreckage II (1990), filtering out her emotions about the Exxon Valdez spill and the impending sabre rattling before Operation Desert Storm. On the wrecked hull of a vessel shape she creates a montage of visual and verbal effects. Words and images pepper the surface ("power", "greed", "Hussein", "Bush", "Begin") and are caught up in the rising flume of a mushrooming atomic cloud. At the base are crowds of refugees and war scenes. The black and white rendering of these images constitutes a darkening holocaust in contrast to the colored landscape foil. The vessel has run aground on rocks--rocks that have embossed surfaces of the currency used by the major Western and Eastern powers. The Last Stand, one of Stahlecker's works from 1992, was especially relevant to her later projects. It consisted of an isolated grove of white trees rising to a skylight, surrounded by ominous, sinuous black forms. This last stand of trees represents her perception of an uncorrupted landscape. But are these futile cries in the wilderness? Of what value are her heroic and romantic utterances in the context of our times? Stahlecker is important as a keeper of our dreams, a sentinel guarding the last vestiges of a paradisical vision. As memento moris and admonitions, Stahlecker's installations allow us to dream and remember. "Dying things are kept alive by thinking of them. Remember to remember. The tree, the dream, darkness, and the light."6   Notes 1) Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos, Trans. Daniel Russell (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 175. 2) Stahlecker, Karen, Artist's Statement, January 1993. 3) Milton, John. Paradise Lost. 4) Kojiki, translated by Donal L. Philippi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 83. 5) Stahlecker, January, 1993. 6) ibid.