![]() ![]() ![]() When I drove up to see the Forest Spiral last week, just before dusk on a cool Friday afternoon, I saw a couple of equestrian riders, picked up on the occasional car driving on Fryingpan Road, and caught wind of a critter or two. And it ultimately led her to create the “Forest Spiral” at Beyul Retreat. That installation at Toklat pointed Whitley in a new direction, working exclusively outdoors, she said. The work hung from the ceiling of the Launchpad in Carbondale, but Whitley wanted to see how it might look outside, too, and she eventually brought a version of it to the woods near Toklat at Ashcroft. ![]() Whitley said the piece is related to “Homecoming,” an smaller installation in the shape of a house that she created from foraged glass in 2017. It’s remarkable just how quiet it is inside the spiral that stretches 125 feet from end to end, although its circular shape gives it a smaller footprint in the forest. The clearing they found reminded Whitley of California and of the “fairy rings” that new-growth redwood trees form in a circle around the stump of a felled tree. Whitley identified the location for the spiral by walking through the entire 32-acre Beyul property with Abby Stern, who co-founded Beyul with Reuben Sadowsky and Andrew Skewes. “My intention is that it will be a contemplative space, a space for meditation for ritual, ceremony, stillness, kind of a listening room for the forest to just tune in to one's own thoughts, but also whatever one can perceive going on in the quiet of a lodgepole pine forest,” Whitley said in an interview at her home in Aspen this month. Some shards are as high as 16 feet above the ground, forming a spiral that artist Lara Whitley hopes people will enter to meditate, reflect and absorb the nature around them. About 26 miles up the Fryingpan River - over a bridge, up a short, snowpacked hill, past the cabins that smell like a cozy night by the fireplace, tucked into the forest along the 10th Mountain Trail near Beyul Retreat in Meredith - more than 3,000 pieces of repurposed glass catch the light of the woods, suspended midair by almost-invisible wire. ![]()
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