Place in the Woods by Carol Mickett and Robert Stackhouse

Commission, metal, 36 foot long x 18 foot high x 18 foot wide

The artists: The work of Carol Mickett and Robert Stackhouse often returns to the history and architecture of ships and vessels, which are linked to metaphors of passage and transition. These forms haunt their drawings, watercolor paintings, and most palpably, their sculptures in bronze and wood. The simplicity of these shapes—usually a skeletal wooden or metal structures—appears both prehistoric and starkly modern. They sometimes intertwine these forms with imagery from Stackhouse’s Floridian upbringing, such as serpents and alligators.

A recent sculpture, In the Blue (from the exhibition Waves of Meaning at the St. Petersburg Art Center in 2008) is a large sculpture that wound through several galleries. Its blue wooden structure evokes a passage through the Gulf of Mexico and its changing currents. Read an essay about Waves of Meaning.

Stackhouse has been a major figure on the contemporary art scene for 30 years. For the last 10 years, Stackhouse and Mickett have collaborated on large scale sculpture and paintings. Stackhouse’s work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among many others. Mickett and Stackhouse live in St. Petersburg, Florida. He is represented by a large drawing in the Hunter collection.

Artwork for Renaissance Park: The Hunter curators asked Carol Mickett and Robert Stackhouse to design a sculpture specifically for Renaissance Park. Entitled Place in the Woods, it would be a 36 foot long, 18 foot high, 18 foot wide sculpture. To find Place in the Woods you must follow a path into the forest and then pass through, sit in, or walk around the sculpture. The sculpture would be made out of extruded and cast metal: bronze, brass, aluminum, or zinc. The casts will be of distinctive recycled wood. With Renaissance Park being an urban park, Place in the Woods is intended to provide a quiet retreat from the bustle of the city.

An earlier work by Stackhouse, Cranbrook Dance, pictured here, provides a glimpse of a structure similar to Place in the Woods.

Site for the artwork: Place in the Woods would be sited in the Flooded Forest which is between the wetlands and the river's edge. It will be sited so that a visitor must walk through a forest to come upon it.