Wistman’s Wood - Joyce Lyon

Groveland Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Joyce Lyon – Wistman’s Wood. Lyon, New York born and Minnesota based, is a maker of drawings and digital artist’s books. She is a founding member of the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota (WARM) and has been the recipient of numerous awards, including: three Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowships, a Jerome MCBA Books Arts Grant, and a Fulbright-Hays Group Project in Poland. Her work has been exhibited and collected nationally over the past thirty years. Lyon is also an Associate Professor of Art emerita at the University of Minnesota.

In this new body of work, Lyon visually records Wistman’s Wood, a piece of land nestled on the southern edge of Dartmoor in Devon, England. Lyon first learned of this place over thirty years ago from an essay by John Fowles. Since then, Lyon has been able to visit Wistman’s Wood on multiple occasions, most recently in October 2015. This unique wood is populated by dwarfed, ancient oaks covered in rare forms of moss and hanging lichens protected by the side of a hilI. As Lyon reflects, “In part these trees have survived because they grow in a clitter field – a field of boulders – that has prevented sheep that graze freely on the moor from being able to enter the wood. Their gnarled, intertwining branches speak to the complex interrelationships among growing things.” Perhaps, as some studies suggest, the habits and interrelationships among these trees mimic our own human relationships. While Lyon has admired Wistman’s Wood for a number of years, this is her first endeavor to capture the bewitching landscape.