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to water below ground. "The inside would be accessible only by climbing up the chimney and the bottom half of the outside would be completely inaccessible - underground." As Liza Béar remarked, "The viewer would have to become physically involved to really experience the piece," which applies to other works of Winsor's, though in a sensuous mental rather than strenuous physical fashion.

"Indoors the size of a piece is somewhere between your own body and the scale of the room the piece is made in. And what was good outdoors was that I was much smaller than the surrounding space; that changed the relationship between myself and the environment.... The outdoor pieces are so specific." The two Winsor has been able to execute (two more are planned for Princeton and Fredonia this year) also imply hidden function. 30 to 1 bound trees, made in a "very scrawny kind of area" in Nova Scotia in 1971, were giant bundles of somewhat stunted white birch trees bound singly and then rebound together. If one were to run across them accidentally, they might seem to be some local method of storing wood or winter fodder, some practical problem unknown but efficiently solved. The largest of the Nova Scotia tree series is centered around a live tree. "Otherwise how would this structure that's 20' high and 5' across stand up with the wind blowing over the top of the quarry? It would blow over. They all stabilize each other. As I was making the piece, I got more and more concerned with the fact that the live tree was being nestled inside ... I saw the live tree as the pivotal part of that work."

In May, 1972, deep in the lush southern woods outside Richmond, Virginia, with the help of students, Winsor made a spindly "shelter" or high platform of saplings bound close together with unwound rope. Here again, if one came upon the piece it might seem to have been built for an extra-esthetic purpose. Esthetically, however, its relationship to its environment was highly succinct - at once so close to nature, in that the raw materials surrounded the structure made from others like them, and so far from it, in that some of those small trees had been cut down and tied together to make a clearly person-made place. More than most artists' (especially those who just plunk an indoor sculpture down in a plaza or field), Winsor's outdoor work is so finely attuned to its natural surroundings that making sculpture outdoors becomes, in turn, a natural process.


*See the series of photographs of this piece in process, published in Avalanche, no. 4, spring, 1972, accompanying an interview with Winsor by Liza Béar, from which most of the quotations in this article have been taken; others come from conversations between the artist and the author.

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va Scotia.

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