The Brooklyn Rail

Sprawling across 140 acres, the second edition of Ground/work at the Clark Art Institute is curated by Glenn Adamson and features six artists: Japanese ceramicist Yō Akiyama, English artist Laura Ellen Bacon, Malian French artist and herbalist Aboubakar Fofana, Black American artist Hugh Hayden, Swiss-German stone carver Milena Naef, and Mexican sculptor Javier Senosiain. I visited on the cusp of autumn on a rainy morning with incremental leaf senescence, where lichens blanket logs and katydids warble in the distance. Each work hinges between life and death, regeneration and decay, rigidity and fragility, making it porous, complicating what’s possible. Rather than assigning negativity to decomposition, the exhibition celebrates life as recomposition.

Comparable to the leaves, Yō Akiyama’s Oscillation: Vertical Garden (all works 2025) can change over time. Its towering black ceramic body with iron powder—most visible among the cracks and rings that widen at the bottom—ushers a rainwater cascade down the sides (the title evoking hydroponics). The work emulates a charred tree, still standing, or a fossil responding to the surrounding verdant trees. Nestled in a bottom crack, patinated like the rusty brown of live tree bark, is an eastern red-backed salamander. This moment is a reminder that the Japanese wabi sabi philosophy opens the door to organic harmony through imperfection and impermanence.

Similarly, life bursts forth from Gathering My Thoughts by Laura Ellen Bacon. While the title implies a process, the work is fully formed: a generative swell anchored by the tree’s torso, creating a direct spatial relationship with the tree by weaving around it. Maybe the work embodies a visualization of an a-ha moment. When approaching Gathering My Thoughts, I noticed the nestlike structure hosts spores, spiders weaving their own webs, and that it emits a tart woody, mildewy, smoky smell, suggesting its role as a facilitator of life.

Bana Yiriw ni Shi Folow (Trees and Seeds of Life), by Aboubakar Fofana, showcases cotton in outdoor sculpture. Often, fabrics are too vulnerable to the elements and are replaced by fabricated plastic polymers that keep a thread-like body. Indigo, ochre, river-bed mud, tannin, terracotta, and mangrove-dyed rosette-bundles (still pigmented despite the elements) come from his farm in Mali, embarking on their own transatlantic journey. With care, the bundles—which the artist sees as “seeds”—are protected yet visible in a rusted steel frame. From afar, the structure echoes the other fauna on the site, but upon closer inspection, the circular leaflets symbolize infinity. Instead, Fofana reclaims the site with materials typically associated with the African diaspora, a stark reminder of Williamstown’s prominence in the textile industry and historical role in the slave trade through its reliance on raw materials harvested and processed by enslaved Africans in the deep south.

Where Fofana’s composition emulates vitality and infinity, Hugh Hayden’s work displays decay. The End, a hollow spinal cord with ribs made of hemlock, twigs as offshoots like nerves and arteries, and has wood chips underneath it and pooling from its center is all joined by wooden pegs, making the lines seamless. From the side, it looks like a centipede tipped on its back. While the wood is dead, there are clear signs of life surrounding it, including vegetation and an alcove for a red-spotted eastern newt. Does the ground and foliage serve as the body, and is this work the skeleton? Could it even attract and sustain termite life? Concerned for the preservation of the work I asked, “Does the conservation team spray this or intervene?” I found out that the work is an experiment, for Hayden, in how it devolves over time, noting how the nonbiodegradable metal hinges that hold the vertebrae together deteriorate compared to the organic matter in the work’s composition.

Instead of being deep in the woods like Hayden’s work, Milena Naef’s Three Times Spanning is the only work in a vista: mountains, a meadow, and neighboring farmland are an unexpected backdrop for marble mined from a quarry in Cristallina, Switzerland; the rigid material demonstrates elasticity in the artist’s hand, its two slabs forming a joint. One curves to the artist’s body with an oculus, where the artist’s heart and lungs would be. This was the windiest point: air whistled through the stone along with a chorus of insects buzzing. The sound and haunting of a body made the work ghastly and alluring. The other embraced a fallen tree from the Clark’s campus. In an act of kismet, in the summer, Communications Manager Carolynn McCormack shared that a hornet’s nest fit into the negative space of the indent of the artist’s ear. Why curve around a fallen tree and leave space for the indent of the artist’s body? Is the tree equated to the body, where the dead maple lay, goldenrod, multiflora rose, and other ruderal plants flourished?

Lastly, and coincidentally, the sightline to Three Times Spanning—the only two works that have a sightline relationship—is Javier Senosiain’s Coata III. Many of the artists chose off-the-beaten-path locations, encouraging intimate encounters, except for Senosiain. Located in a marshy pond is a colorful serpent with brilliant scales made using mosaics. While it is close to the main road and visible from several of the Clark’s buildings, the work only facilitates spectatorship—taking all its grandeur—but you can’t get close at the risk of sinking into the swamp at best and falling in the water at worst. Keeping you at a distance forces viewers to practice reverence, which is apt because the work is inspired by Mesoamerican folklore and imagination.

Overall, much thought has been given to the audience for this exhibition as golf carts are needed to get to all of these points, with some requiring venturing off the path. This perhaps calls the unassuming people going on the trails to take a look and comically, as many signs pointed out, a call to the bears and other wildlife to explore it as well.