Some landscapes enter the work before the artist knows they are material.
Don’s childhood ground fits inside a relatively tight area of northeastern Wisconsin: a farmstead, family houses, school, bay shore, the Niagara Escarpment, and small Walloon settlements gathered within roughly twenty-five miles. The densest portion is smaller. Great-grandmother’s house, grandmother’s house, and the farm were separated by distances that could be measured in a few miles rather than migrations.
As a child, this was not a bioregional framework. It was where things were.
The later work borrowed its structures. Orchards, hedgerows, creeks, farm fields, limestone, shorelines, roadside chapels, working buildings, and family routes reappeared in prints, installations, almanacs, invented places, and the language used to explain them. The landscape became visible partly by being left and revisited.
Borrowed is an uneasy word here.
Land can be owned, inherited, sold, enclosed, protected, taken, restored, and represented. A person can love a place and still misunderstand its history. Family presence does not create original title. Creative use does not transfer the ground into the artist’s possession.
To call a landscape borrowed is to admit an obligation of return, though the return cannot be literal. A mural, story, map, or creature made from a place does not give the creek back. It can acknowledge sources, preserve specific names carefully, support physical stewardship, resist false claims, and remain open to correction.
The childhood map makes one such correction. It places family history inside the largest concentrated Walloon community in North America, but also places the bay shore on Ho-Chunk ancestral ground and within histories that precede the family’s nineteenth-century arrival. The same map can hold intimacy and non-primacy. Being formed by a place does not mean being first there.
The 2013 return that produced Portage Year: An Almanach introduced another kind of distance. Don lived several miles south of the childhood cluster and revisited it repeatedly. That separation was small enough for regular contact and large enough to make the familiar ground available for study.
The current move to Algoma shifts the orientation again. The childhood shore faced the Bay of Green Bay. Algoma faces Lake Michigan. The daily water moves from the sunset side of the peninsula to the sunrise side, while the work remains inside the same broader cultural and geological region.
These changes matter because landscape is not only scenery. It sets scale and habit.
A farm childhood teaches distances among house, field, outbuilding, road, and tree line. A narrow downtown parcel teaches vertical use, shared walls, alley access, storefront exposure, and the cost of every square foot. Conservation work teaches parcels, preserves, donor histories, habitat, public access, and the limits of what should be placed on a map. Mural work teaches walls as public surfaces within towns that already have stories about themselves.
The artist carries these arrangements into other work. An invented world receives watersheds, working settlements, edges, shrines, and routes because those forms already organize perception. A gallery installation becomes a place a person can enter rather than an image to stand before. An archive is arranged as geography.
Influence is not replication. The best evidence of a landscape’s effect may be structural rather than pictorial.
This also means the work can misuse what it borrows. A shoreline can become atmosphere. Rural labor can become costume. Ecological language can supply virtue without changing a material decision. An ancestral name can be invoked without the living people whose history it carries.
The guard against that misuse is not purity. It is continued accounting.
Which details came from direct memory? Which from a map? Which history is documented by another source? Which claim belongs to a community rather than the artist? What has the work returned through care, money, maintenance, attention, or public usefulness?
The landscape does not become ours because it changed us. The change is part of what we owe it.
Sources
self/bioregional-map.mdcreative/widdershins/grant/personal-background.mdcreative/art-archive/artist-statements/portage-year.mdknowledge/property.md
Workshop Note
This draft makes a strong interpretive claim about Don’s life and work. Every first-person implication, ancestral framing, and account of place influence requires authorship confirmation before candidate status.