The Mike Shaffer Project

Stick Stacks—Dryland Beaver Barns

Sunlight, diffused and in small spots, reaches the floor of the Canaan Valley Institute property near the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia amidst tall deciduous trees and conifers. Areas of dense rhododendron thickets and open forestscapes of ferns and compacted leaves predominate. Tall trees such as oaks that die remain standing for decades, dropping their twigs first, and later, the thicker branches as the weakness of decay approaches the trunk. Under these stately towers, fallen limbs become linear elements in the minds of certain 3d artists for which the environmental is their studio, their source of supplies, and their gallery.


"Beaver Barn 4," about 2 x 2 x 4 teet

Stacks of crisscrossing pieces of wood are the basic configuration of frontier log cabins as well as certain works of art. Limited by the materials at hand, Mike Shaffer's Beaver Barns, as he calls them (by dryland beavers, he says), jut up like monster mushrooms from the leafy mat.