Windgrove

As you know, the research component of my PhD studies is to interview artists (literary, visual, and performance) in Tasmania and Newfoundland, focusing on their attachment to place. With help from my supervisors – and many others I’ve come in contact with here in Tasmania - I’ve been working on my list of whom to approach. And one of them is sculptor Peter Adams.

Before Christmas Pete took me out to his place on the Tasman Peninsula, approximately two hours from Hobart, near Nubeena. (The peninsula could be an island, as there’s a bridge over a canal located at Dunnalley…)

Peter lives at “Windgrove,” where he sculpts beautiful pieces of art from wood while sculpting “home” from his 100-acre plot of paradise that borders Roaring Beach and the Great Southern Ocean. 

 Before leaving town I checked out his blog, finding professional-quality photos of his work and his home, interspersed with eloquent musings about art and life. The first one I came to was about gratitude, written over the American Thanksgiving weekend (Peter is originally from the US), about thanksgiving on a daily basis, or as he writes, “on an hourly basis,” and how it “is enhanced by how closely we observe what beauty actually companions us through each day.” Because I’m so conscious of the privilege that I’ve been given – to be here, on a beautiful island, doing something I love – I was anxious to meet this man. 

A tall gangly fellow with a huge boyish grin, Peter is an open book. He lives his life with a generosity of spirit that is infectious – I felt within minutes of being in his presence that I had been given a huge gift.

When we arrived he was working on a roundish sculpture cradled on an inner tube in his outdoor studio. It looked like butterfly, or a shell, with a round stone inset in the wood where the hinge or butterfly body would be. He has since written about it on his blog, a wonderful and mysterious story about where inspiration comes from. Be sure to check out his photos, as the sculpture is much further along in its creation than the photos I took!

He then invited us into his home – a gorgeous light-infused house he started building nearly twenty years ago while living in an old bus out back. 

 You can tell he LOVES creating with wood – the beams are exposed and they, along with the walls, have benefited from the many windows: the wood is burnished to a golden brown that glows with warmth. Again, if you scroll through his blog, you’ll find photos of his place (I felt it would be an intrusion if I took any). I especially like the one of him soaking in his bathtub outside on the deck. 

Peter treated us to some local smoked octopus and cheese on one of his decks, before taking us for a walk around the property. I longed to have tucked a tape recorder into his pocket so I could capture the stories he told us as we strolled: about the middens he’s found and how he would have liked to have been there when the Aboriginal people walked these same pathways along the top of the cliff, feasting on shellfish and leaving traces to be found a thousand years later; about the benches he created so people could enjoy the peace of the woods, or Roaring Beach from different vantage points; about the planting he’s done to reclaim a sheep paddock and restore it to its original native bush; about the friendship circle he’s created high on the hill…

 His is a deeply storied place, and he has obviously developed what American writer Barry Lopez calls “an ethical unity” with Windgrove. Lopez writes, “If you’re intimate with a place, a place with whose history you’re familiar, and you establish an ethical conversation with it, the implication that follows is this: the place knows you’re there. It feels you. You will not be forgotten, cut off, abandoned.” The feeling that Peter’s land knows he’s here is palpable – or maybe it’s that he knows its stories so well, and is able to put words to them - I don’t know…

We talked about his relationship with his island place, how he realizes he could not be doing what he’s doing here back in America. We talked about how an island gives you the freedom to create – you can walk to the edge and then walk back - the psychological boundary ensures that your energy doesn’t “bleed away.” We talked about the books he’s reading, and how he uses mythology to bring deeper meaning to his sculptures while at the same time taking inspiration from the natural world, blending the two. And we talked about what will happen to his land after he’s gone.

I found a quote from him in a teachers’ resource guide at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG), where I saw one of his bench sculptures in one of the rooms devoted to postmodern art. He says, “I try to heal humankind’s relationship to the earth – my choice of means is wood and stones… These materials have a vibration, a story we can tap into, that we as humans should learn from in order to find our meaningful place in the world” (from “Objects of Contemplation,” Craft Arts International, no. 42, 1998).

 Such a place. Such stories. For me, Peter Adams is a conduit to this island – to understanding its significance to island studies through his art and words. 

Before we left, he agreed to be one of my interviewees. And for that I am grateful, too.