Sculpture in the wild marks 10th season with more space, new works and familiar faces.

Blackfoot Pathways: Sculpture in the Wild marked their 10th season last month with the return of some familiar faces who created two new installations in a 15-acre expansion to the sculpture park.

“Two new installations will bring our total for art installations in the park to 24,” BPSW President Becky Garland told the dozens of visitors who showed up Sept. 23, for the new sculpture launch. “The other thing we’re really really happy about is that we just signed on with the Forest Service, through a special use permit (on) 15 acres that allow us to expand east. That’s huge. That’s where the two new pieces are.”

BPSW co-founder Kevin O’Dwyer returned to Lincoln this year as an artist - and interim artistic director - after stepping down from that role in 2021.

“When I stepped down as director two years ago, (BPSW President Becky Garland) said ‘will you ever come back to Lincoln?’ I said yes, but I’m coming back as an artist and I want to celebrate the 10th anniversary,” he said during the Sept. 23 new sculpture launch.” Well, I came back as an artist to find out I’m wearing the director’s hat, for this program anyway.”

Also returning to Sculpture in the Wild were Sam Clayton and Mark Jacobs, who created “East-West Passage” during the sculpture parks second season in 2015.

Their return to Montana actually covered more than the three-week residency. Both men brought their families along for a tour of the state. But first, they made a stop in Lincoln for a momentous occasion as Clayton and his partner of 28 years, Antonella, tied the knot at East-West passage on Aug.18

Clayton and Jacobs returned to Lincoln for a site visit in June, which gave them a chance to see how far Sculpture in the Wild has grown since 2015, something they haven’t always had the chance to do at other locations around the world where they’ve worked on installations.

“It was interesting going around to all the other sculptures,” Clayton said. “What Mark and I realized was that we liked the ones that completely changed your environment entirely: what you can see, what you can hear, what you can smell. That was partly why we made (East-West Passage) like that.”

Taking additional inspiration from pieces like “Clearing,” “Stringer,” and “Tree Circus” they decided to create “Root Room”, an enclosure using something often found locally after windstorms: the roots system of spruce trees. Unlike Lincoln’s iconic ponderosas, which have a big taproot and root ball, spruce tend to have wide, shallow, flat root fans perfect for creating the walls of the room.

“Even walking through the forest, fallen trees change your perspective as you walk past them,” Jacobs noted.

With the help of volunteer Mike Brown, Clayton and Jacobs were able to take trees from neighboring Grosfield Ranch property. “They let us take what we needed,” Clayton said, “We’ve been carefully digging out around the trees…and then gently nudging them over.”

The trees were aligned north, south, east and west, with the root fans creating the walls of the room. A gap in the northwest corner allows visitors to enter, where they are immersed in the tree’s delicate root systems and the smell of the soil bound within them. Like most of the work at Sculpture in the Wild “Root Room” will change over time as the elements take their toll, but Clayton hopes the ground-level plants that came up with them, including wild roses, will remain viable for at least a couple years.

Just a couple hundred yards to the south of Root Room stands O’Dwyer’s “Creativity, Collaboration and Community,” a monumental triangle celebrating 10 years of Sculpture in the Wild.

“It looks at the creativity that came into Lincoln, the collaboration of all the people of the community to make this place,” O’Dwyer said.

He explained that such monumental markers, including standing stones in Britain and his home country of Ireland, have celebrated certain occasions going back to neolithic times.

“We really don’t know what they were celebrating, if it was a festival of seasons or whatever, but it is a marker in time,” he said. “This is like the 10th anniversary marker in time.”

Sitting in a small meadow, the open triangle is made of steel and staggered layers of thick fir timbers and creates a visual frame for the surrounding trees.

“It’s an equilateral triangle. It makes a really nice form in that landscape,” O’Dwyer said. I like working with simple geometric forms. People can read into it whatever they like. It’s not obvious. The other beauty of this is when the light hits it, it creates lovely shadows all the way through here.”

O’Dwyer explained that he’s been thinking about this installation for the last two years and built a prototype near his home in Ireland.

The sculpture is, in a way, a bookend for his 2002 work, “60 Degrees,” a series of three separate equilateral triangles that decease in size. It was created using steel and old oak sleepers from a railroad that once carried peat from the now-defunct cutaway bogs near Lough Boorra in Ireland, where he helped develop Sculpture in the Parklands.

“Creativity, Collaboration and Community” also gave O’Dwyer the chance to again work with Pitman Engineering in Seeley Lake, who worked with him to reconstruct the Delaney Mill Teepee Burner as the centerpiece of Sculpture in the Wild.

“I really wanted to work with David and Matt again. They have the facilities, so I went in with the drawings and a maquette and everything and we worked through the whole idea,” he said. The wood was custom cut here in Lincoln by Leroy Blancher at L&L Custom Sawing “He did all the wood, and he did a beautiful job.”

Working with Marshall Bullis, Jeremy Harkcom and Jim Freestone, O’Dwyer used the fir timbers to create three staggered wooden triangles on each side of the super structure that adds depth to piece. Once completed, he used the remaining wood to create three triangular benches around trees nearby, giving visitors places to rest and consider the piece from different perspectives.

“We’re not sealing the wood; the wood will gray up. The steel will patina into a rust, and create that orange and gray, which plays off my other pieces, which are kind of that industrial and environmental.”

“We’re so thankful that he fell in love with Lincoln and came to Lincoln and shared his knowledge about the sculpture park and his passion and his drive to make all of us, as a community come together,” Garland told the crowd at the launch.

Moving forward, BPSW faces the challenge of finding a new executive director. Jenny Bevill, who took on the job in January, announced her resignation ahead of the fall residency. Though she intended to serve a lengthy tenure, she had other commitments made it difficult for her to dedicate the amount of time necessary to lead Sculpture in the Wild into the future.

During her brief time with BPSW, Bevill led efforts to increase BPSW’s social media presence and developed an artist application committee to help broaden the diversity of the artists while ensuring the quality of the work at Sculpture in the Wild remains high.

Overall, however, there is plenty of promise for the sculpture park’s future. Sculpture in the Wild remains a premier art destination in the state and the added 15 acres gives it plenty of room to grow and expand. Additionally, a significant (but still pending) bequest from the estate of Pete Bevis, a sculptor who passed away in 2022, will bring additional funding to the sculpture park.

Bevis made headlines in Seattle in the 1980s and 90s by building an arts foundry in the Fremont neighborhood and through his ultimately futile effort to save an historic Seattle art deco ferry called the Kalakala. He also brought a 16-foot-tall statue of Vladimir Lenin to Fremont as a reminder of a turbulent period of history.