Art of Renewal

Mimi Cavender

It was new. Mysterious. It intrigued me right off the nature trail and, along swirls of scented wood, spiraled me into its center. Safe inside, I felt delight and something primordial. I was opening my senses as a baby bird first knows the world—and my mind to new ideas.

Patsy Glenn Refuge is hidden in oak and juniper woods behind the Community Center in downtown Wimberley, Texas. It is a small nature preserve with public trails and an excellent birding station. In April of 2023, Wimberley Parks and Recreation and a consortium of local nature-conscious organizations celebrated the ongoing renewal of this slice of Texas Hill Country native habitat. They dedicated the new engineered wetlands beyond the birding station. Read about Patsy Glenn Refuge here before you take a walk with me to feel what I felt that day on the trail.

Good, ready to go? Let’s park our car in the quiet back end of the Wimberley Community Center’s deep stretch of free public parking. There’s a new stone entrance marker and a chimney swift roost / information kiosk at the trailhead.

A shady bench under escarpment oaks is not for us this April morning; we’re headed down to the woodsy back end of the park to see if recent rains affected the new wetlands.

Less than a hundred yards down the trail, after passing the path to the birding station, we see something new! It wasn’t here a week ago—a wall of cut juniper trunks—a stockade?

We walk past and look in. A graceful woman with a power driver and a flowered apron turned tool belt interweaves long cedar limbs and secures them in waves along the interior of the stockade. A chainsaw, pliers, clippers, and boxes of hex screws lie in a litter of fresh-stripped cedar curls. She waves the power driver—Yes, sure, come in!

Inside, the stockade is now a spiral, a clockwise curve. To where? A giant woven basket swirls around us now, fragrant bark litter deepens underfoot, the curve narrows, caressing, protecting. There’s a center post, concaved and polished to make a birdbath—“a gift,” we’d learn, “for the birds.” Under us is a bed of bark.

This would best have been experienced with eyes closed and only our hand and the fragrance guiding us toward the center: we’re safe, and amazed, new in this new world. We’re in a nest—nature’s renewal machine!

There’s a quietly intense young man in here stripping the shaggy bark “on the inside walls only,” he says, “to be like a nest’s softer interior. And the red color’s nice, too.”

Wimberley fourteen-year-old Quintin Buchanan created this installation with his mentor, our power-driving sculptor just around the spiral. It was Quintin, we learned, who had originally suggested a discovery experience, nest-like, to fit the bird sanctuary mission of Patsy Glenn.

We were curious: in Texas schools, where art programs are underfunded into extinction, how would he answer someone’s “You’re an artist? Hey, man, what does art do?”

Quintin—who at 14 already knows he will help shape the future of digital technologies and nurture his love of art and nature—thought a few heartbeats…“Art is a progressive and effective way to add meaning to things.”

He said he’d calculated this nest’s spiral applying the Fibonacci sequence, “but then I had to tweak the math a little when it didn’t fit the site. But hey, it works.” The Fibonacci sequence? I didn’t know what it was until I was 40 and still have to look it up.

Talking more with this handsome, precocious young man and his mentor, Texas artist Heather Carter, we discover more backstory to the nest in the Refuge. Let’s hear it straight from the people at Wimberley-based projectART who made it happen.

projectART Board Secretary **Heather Carter** is a wood sculptor, parent, and former public charter school board trustee. After a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Southwestern University, her commissioned work enhances Austin Public Libraries and various large commercial spaces in Texas. She has taught project-based learning activities with middle- and high school students and as a visiting artist at secondary and college levels. In Wimberley, Heather enjoys her work in projectMentor and in designing student curriculum that includes Maker Spaces and Entrepreneurship. She hopes that ProjectART can be a catalyst for bringing art into every subject.

Heather’s portfolio is on her personal website at http://www.heathercarter.info/

Heather, this magazine now reaches beyond the Hays County chapter of Texas Master Naturalist™ and the talented citizens of Wimberley. Expanded readership means that folks who don’t know you might ask, "What kind of art do you do?”

I’m a wood sculptor who specializes in installation work and permanent pieces designed specifically for a space. A lot of my work has an environmental message, like the Lifeboats and the Tideline Quote wall installed at the Leaning Pear [restaurant] in Wimberley.

What in your childhood might have shaped your creative sensibilities?

I’m the daughter of an architect, so 3D design has always been in my genes. My grandmother was a painter and jewelry maker, and my mother is an impeccable seamstress who taught me to sew my own dresses in high school. It was probably my first exposure to 3D design and experimenting with shape and texture.

How do you respond to your own children's creativity?

I gush! I get so proud when I see them doing something creative, expressing themselves that way.

How do you use your sensibilities and skills with projectART in Wimberley?

projectART has been so rewarding for me. I am able to use my design skills to create things like our wooden ARTSPACE puzzle fundraiser that we sent out last fall and to do some graphics for events like PROM and projectMENTOR. Currently I’m designing our new signage and art walls for the ARTSPACE gallery going in over the summer at the Lowery House [the former Sugar Shack Bakery near Leaning Pear in Wimberley].

And your mentee, Quintin Buchanan?

Quintin is a brilliant young man. He’s 14, the son of Rachel and Matthew Buchanan, owners of the Leaning Pear. He has so much to say about his ideas and came into our projectMENTOR program excited to try any kind of art.
He is captivated by installation work that he’s seen through traveling with his family; we talked quite a bit about those installations and how, if we created an installation piece, we’d like our piece to affect people. He’s passionate about raising awareness around protecting the natural environment in our area. I knew instantly that we’d make a good team for creating something together.

What's the title of your "nest” piece in Patsy Glenn Refuge?

The title right now is Sanctuary. Richard Shaver with the Parks Board says that the piece can stay as long as wanted. It’s definitely built to last a long time. It’s a 20’ by 16’ spiral, 9’ tall. It’s built out of fallen cedar [Ashe juniper] from the [January 2023] ice storm, reinforced with [cleverly hidden] metal T posts and hog wire panel.

How would you imagine visitors' experiencing the piece?

We hope that visitors see the opening of the piece as an invitation and that they are curious to see what the spiral pathway leads to as they walk inside. The inside and outside [texture] isn’t the same—many nests or shells are rough, protective, and structural on the outside but smooth, comforting, and nurturing on the inside. This piece celebrates junipers as life giving, water saving, soil building, and habitat protecting trees. It’s built with salvaged trunks and branches of junipers lost in the ice storm we all experienced in late January [2023]. Building something beautiful out of loss is definitely a theme Quintin and I have talked about while creating this piece since we both experienced loss this spring.

What role does art have in encouraging our appreciation of the natural world?

I feel that using my art for appreciation of the natural world is why I’m here. Through many years of working with wood and using materials that have a story behind them—whether it’s recycled wooden signage material or strips of old painted wood from a torn down house or even fallen juniper saved from a burn or mulch pile—I’ve created pieces that keep telling the story, keep it alive, keep it relevant longer. It’s conservation, re-purpose. It’s art!

Where else in Hays County do you dream of seeing this integration of public art in nature?

I hope our pieces built of natural materials integrate nicely with the mission of the parks system of Wimberley and surrounding cities. The parks offer wonderful education opportunities for every age, and weaving in environmental art is perfect for raising awareness. I hope that projectART continues our work with Wimberley Parks, creating more pieces like this one for the public to enjoy and ponder.

How can Master Naturalists (trained volunteers) best collaborate with "art in the park" initiatives?

By sharing the message of what the work means, by suggesting appropriate materials, maybe even suggesting sites where our art would have minimal environmental impact but have great public exposure, helping us to raise awareness together. I see wonderful potential for collaboration in this way.

projectART Board President **Jamie Pettit** is a mixed-media artist and art teacher who taught elementary art for 20 years in Austin I.S.D. and managed, designed, and taught an Austin summer art program for 11 years. Jamie holds a 1997 Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art from the university of Houston and certification as an art teacher. She has exhibited in Houston and Austin and was chosen for The People’s Gallery 2020 show at Austin City Hall. She believes art is essential and is excited about projectART’s youth art mission advocating for art education in the Wimberley area. Jamie is also a Hays County Chapter member of Texas Master Naturalist™.

How did Heather and Quintin’s art piece find its home in Patsy Glenn Refuge? Jamie responds:

As a HCMN volunteer at Blue Hole Park Wednesdays, I know [Wimberley] Parks Director Richard Shaver, and Heather and I met with him [seeking a partnership with the Parks in displaying this piece. We were originally thinking about Blue Hole as the location, but Richard came up with the idea of PGR, which was brilliant, given the message this installation is bringing specifically about the endangered golden-cheeked warbler. projectART has a new partnership with Wimberley Parks and Recreation and does plan more installation art in all of the parks, as well as other fun events. We are so excited!

Public art in protected greenspaces?

As a founding Board Member of projectART, I want to make art more accessible to the public. I feel that creating art that has such an important environmental message invites our youth and the general public to become aware of our water issues; they’ll see how art can communicate this important information in a visually stunning way. The installation piece is particularly meaningful because you can actually walk into it and experience it in three-dimensions, as well as with your senses of touch, smell, sight, and hearing.

And projectART’s mentorship program?

projectMENTOR is a program initiated by our founder and Executive Director Jennnifer Ober. It places Wimberley area youth in grades 7 through 11 with professional artists for a semester-long apprenticeship, where students learn the creative process: brainstorming ideas, creating two pieces of art, and understanding the business aspect of marketing and displaying the finished pieces.

Back in Patsy Glenn, it’s time to leave the nest—a lovely metaphor made tangible here in this modest hometown place. As we fledge into the wider world of stones and prickly things, we remember that a nest is an incubator of renewal, a safe place for miracles to happen. We pass the artist, working her ladder toward the exit, patiently weaving metaphor into a public space.

“Yes,” she tells us, “so many of our birds weave cedar strips into their nest.” The golden-cheeked warbler, whose cedars have been ripped out by ruthless urban sprawl, is the poster bird for irreparable loss of Texas wildlife habitat. “This floor will be deep in cedar bark.”

Sculptor and naturalist today in dialog, educators both, have shared the art of renewal. We imagine park visitors here, fledging strong and new.

As a nest renews life, as our greenspaces renew many lives, we artists, educators, and naturalists understand one another. We’re returning art to our families, communities, schools, and our public spaces because it renews our hearts and minds. Together now we’re tasked with renewing an ancient human instinct: humility before nature—a healthy sense of our integration into a natural world.

projectMENTOR is a program sponsored by projectART Wimberley, a non-profit organization with a mission to support art education and provide creative opportunities for the youth of Wimberley, Texas. For 2023 projectMENTOR has paired Wimberley area students in grades 7-11 with professional artists for a semester-long apprenticeship. The students will experience the creative process from conception to sale, learning both the business and creation aspects of being a working artist.

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