Lynne Hull

(This story appeared in High Performance #62, Summer 1993.)

Participating in a Lynne Hull project is like dropping pebbles into a pool, then watching as the ripples widen and regenerate: what initially seems like a simple gesture creates not just a fascinating effect, but a phenomenon with ever-widening implications.

Hull is a Wyoming artist who decided about ten years ago to turn away from cute clay pots and make art for wildlife instead. She became an environmental problem-solver, gathering data from wildlife scientists, from communities and from her own conscience in order to improve living conditions for nonhuman species. Her raptor roosts, waterfowl nesting platforms and small mammal habitats, as well as interpretive trails and wildlife observation areas, occur nationwide and in England.

Hull's most recent project is Dreaming Missoula, sponsored by Montana's Missoula Museum of the Arts. Its long-term goal is to enhance sites along the Clark Fork River in Missoula's downtown, where the needs of humans and the needs of wildlife often meet and conflict. Laura Millim, Director of the Museum, wanted to advance the institution's tradition of supporting environmental art by encouraging work that was on site and community based. Furthermore, she wanted art that not only identified environmental problems, but also acted on them.

Hull's work fit perfectly with these aims. "Lynne is quite remarkable in her ability to communicate with people in all levels and sectors concerning her environmental ideas," observes Millim. "She is able to convince public officials that her projects are practical and do-able. She takes simple problems and orchestrates public involvement to solve them. And she's nonconfrontational: gentle but determined."

The first phase of Dreaming Missoula, implemented in April, dealt with a troublesome invasion of beaver. Before Hull approached the situation, the beaver were decimating the trees along the downtown riverbank, making it even less scenic than it already is. City officials were considering how to eliminate the offending wildlife.

Instead, Hull worked out a compromise: Missoula could use the beaver as a corps of engineers. Because root balls were beginning to break down the water control system that keeps Missoula's downtown from flooding, the city was preparing to remove trees from the riverbank anyway. These trees were "given" to the beaver. Hull then asked community members to decorate protective wraps of metal mesh to prevent beaver from gnawing on the trees that were to remain. Volunteers would monitor the trees' growth over the years, and would adjust the protective wraps.

Because objections were raised by environmentalists and other individuals who felt that art (especially art made from manmade and found objects) had no business beside the Clark Fork, this phase of Dreaming Missoula has been only partially realized. However, Hull has provided the city with a model for aesthetic collaboration between animals and people, which could one day result in downtown Missoula having a beaver colony, an intact water control system and the trees, too. "I haven't solved the problem, but now Missoula has a tool that it can use to solve the problem," remarks Hull. Another component of the project, to build a butterfly habitat on an island in the same area, was successfully completed.

After working with Lynne on several projects, I can't describe her "art for animals" without also emphasizing what it does for humans. Certainly, there is artistic integrity and environmental urgency in giving a hawk a place to roost, or a bat a secure hibernaculum. But one aesthetically rehabilitated meadow, or even a hundred, will not save an ecosystem. Ironically, her work's greatest strength may lie in how it can educate and unite people; and perhaps more ironically, this ultimately could save an ecosystem.

Hull's collaborators range from telephone company employees and wildlife biologists to fellow artists and the residents of a youth crisis center. If their experiences working with Lynne are anything like mine, they initially ask themselves, "Why am I dragging dead branches into huge sculptural piles in the National Forest just so one pine marten family can survive the winter?" Or, "Why have I extended this 15-minute meeting to an hour, and become excited about an interpretive nature trail next to the Interstate?" The answer for Deborah Mitchell, Curator of the Missoula Museum of the Arts, is that working with Lynne is "an exciting learning experience similar to the creative process in general."

Hull's projects nearly always require delicate choreography between government officials, private citizens, the natural world and the arts. The people who are involved must share each other's needs and knowledge, and this collaboration provides an opportunity for all parties to grow. As their decisions and activities mitigate damage to wildlife habitat, participants not only begin to move away from the anthropocentric model (earth exists for humans alone), they also begin to recognize the power art can have in their lives, as a functional and transformational experience.

Lynne Hull's work implies that if humans today have a role in nature, it may be our job to make a flexible community where before there existed only winning and losing factions.

Sue Thornton is an artist and writer living near Pinedale, Wyoming.

This story originally appeared in High Performance #62, Summer 1993

Original CAN/API publication: December 1999