Haystacks Mountain School, Maine
Haystack Veil is a landscape of cut saplings, thirty
thousand twigs cut and bundled into a knit veil floating over a
moss and lichen covered cliff alongside the Atlantic Ocean. Haystack
Veil bears on the land following primordial topography, a cloak
over the earth. The project was developed as a collaboration between
Philip Beesley and Philadelphia artist Warren Seelig in 1998, working
with a group of textile students at the renowned Haystacks Mountain
School for the Crafts in Maine.
Haystack Veil was constructed on the glacier-formed shorecliffs
near the school. A quarter-acre in size, the fabric is a tri-axial
lattice structure made from a network of repeating sapling tripods
carrying long bundled twig fibres. The fibres form a continuous
meshwork floating about sixteen inches above the ground. The firmly
planted feet of each tripod stand toe to toe and brace each other.
This resilient anchoring makes the fabric behave like a second skin
for the ground.
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