“Joan Mayfield and Ruth Trevarrow depict trees after humans have had their way with them. The two local artists paired in the Athenaeum’s “Woodcuts” take their cues from stumps and castoff boards, distilling their subjects to meandering black lines or nestled fragments.
Bark (detail), Joan Mayfield, Found wood, 28” x 32”
Among the inspirations for Trevarrow’s large black-and-white prints is an elm that used to stand near D.C.’s Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial. The artist’s “MLK Elm1” is an exact rendering of the stump’s contour, executed in a thick black line and filled with hundreds of simulated concentric tree rings. Such pictures are memorials to bygone organisms, but their complex forms are alive with possibility.
Mayfield’s found-wood collages are made of materials that have been wrenched even farther from their natural origins. Yet the battered, partly painted slats are often arranged in ways that evoke their previous existence as part of a living organism. One piece deploys twisting blond-wood uprights that reach toward a blue backdrop that evokes sky. Mayfield doesn’t merely reuse wood; she, symbolically at least, replants it.”
Review by Mark Jenkins, Washington Post, November 2022. Thank you!
Joan Mayfield and Ruth Trevarrow: Woodcuts Through Nov. 13 at the Athenaeum, 201 Prince St., Alexandria.
Tree Rings: Orleans, MA Large Locust, Ruth Trevarrow