Recycled Park and Forest Service uniform pants and shirts, twill fabric, fasteners, square and flat stock, brackets, matte board and GCC report inserts, covered gallery bench

Artist Statement:

"Stewards” is an interactive installation of moveable fabric elements, with nearby included seating. Viewers are invited to move and manipulate the fabric elements of the wall installation.

The connected fabric elements abstract the complexity of the forest: its physical structure, cultural meaning, and economic reality. The composition of the wall installation evokes data or text on a page, in keeping with the aspect of abstraction. The colors included represent growth (green) and burn (beige), two fundamental forces in forest ecology.

Fire has a connected history within forest management. Indigenous communities have long used fire as a tool in land management and sustainability, and national organizations administering land today employ fire to manage growth.

During my time at the Disturbance Boot Camp, I was most impressed by the number of people who had participated in managing land resources – with all of the challenges and responsibilities that come with doing that work. There were stories of individuals holding onto uniform pants long after their service, and the pride that clothing evoked.

The fabric used in the wall installation and bench covering is sourced from individual workwear uniforms, stitching together the women and men involved in land service over time and location. The piece creates an intersection between information and implementation and invites viewers to reflect on the hands-on work and near-constant decisions needed to care for a complex system that sustains us.

Artist Bio:

Cori Champagne is best known for wearable art which transforms to meet the changing needs of the eco-future. Her body of work responds with adaptive design solutions intended to survive challenging environments.

Her work has been exhibited all over the US, including Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, Monte Vista Projects in LA, and at Michigan Tech University, among many others. In addition to exhibitions of her sculptural works, Cori has been the recipient of numerous competitions to create site-specific temporary installations, such the Garner Arts Festival, and the Feverish World conference at the University of Vermont.

She has exhibited independently and with two artist collectives: Bunny Sandwich Collective, and ArtShape Mammoth, before joining Boston Sculptors Gallery in 2020. In addition to her studio practice, Cori is adjunct faculty at Boston Architectural College, in the School of Architecture, and is a program manager at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Scientists Statement:

HETEROGENEITY(het-er-uh-jee-nee-i-tee)

Healthy forests are rarely uniform. Across a landscape, trees vary in age, size, density, and species. Openings interrupt stands of trees. Grasses and shrubs dominate some patches, while others are shaded by canopy. Ecologists call this variation “heterogeneity.”

Heterogeneity occurs at many scales. Across an entire watershed, repeated fires, droughts, insects, and other disturbances produce a massive mosaic of forest types and conditions.

This variation matters. Different forest structures support different species, distribute competition for water and nutrients, and respond differently to stress. As wildfire, drought, or insects move across a heterogeneous landscape, they encounter changing conditions. A disturbance that causes extensive mortality in one patch may have much less effect in another. The result is a landscape where some places change dramatically while others persist, providing refuges and sources for recovery.

Disturbance is not simply something that happens to this mosaic; it is one of the processes that continually creates it. Fire, drought, insects, wind, and floods remove some organisms and spare others, setting different parts of the landscape on different trajectories.

Human actions can also diminish or reinforce these patterns. The Forest Service and National Park Service uniforms used in this artwork introduce another kind of heterogeneity: the people who manage landscapes bring different backgrounds, experiences, knowledge, and values to that work. The decisions of the people who wore these very uniforms translate those different ways of understanding a forest into patterns on the ground.

There is no single arrangement that defines a healthy forest—and no single way of valuing one.

By rearranging these panels, we share the serious responsibility that land managers hold in considering the long-term impacts of their decisions. We create different landscapes from the same pieces: different patterns, different possibilities, and different ideas of what the landscape might become.

PHOTOS BY ALEX CANCRO