Reflections — in word and film — on Patrick Dougherty’s place-based sculpture, ‘That Old-Time Religion’
By Shara Lange
In 2013, internationally renowned artist Patrick Dougherty came to East Tennessee State University’s campus and worked with the community to build a stick sculpture, “That Old-Time Religion,” employing methods and materials that he had used in the hundreds of other sculptures that he has built around
the world. My film students and I documented the process of building the sculpture. A few years later we filmed bulldozers taking the sculpture down. In 2019 I completed a short film, Work Sticks, about the process of building “That Old-Time Religion” on our campus and my relationship to the sculpture.
Besides loving the sculpture itself and being interested in the collaborative process employed by Dougherty, I was also sentimental about this first playground, a place where my little daughters played as toddlers. Nostalgia for childhood, simplicity, and nature are not uncommon responses to Dougherty’s works. “The impact was different than so many sculptures, because you like them but you forget them,” Dougherty said “Because of the connection people have with their childhood and with the environment in general, it’s a bit transportive and therefore it's lodged a little more thoroughly in their mind.”
In my short film, Work Sticks: Art, Impermanence & Childhood in an East Tennessee Town, my daughters tell a story that helps weave together the scenes of the making of the sculpture and the anecdotes from Dougherty and Inga Sarkodie, then a student volunteer, who helped construct the sculpture from saplings harvested from our campus woods. The shots of snow filtering through the Dougherty sculpture were a cheat filmed in Montreal at a Dougherty sculpture in the botanical gardens there. It doesn’t snow too much these days in Johnson City, Tennessee.
Many things have changed since “That Old-Time Religion,” came and went. Last year, Dougherty retired to North Carolina after working with his son on numerous additional stick sculptures around the world. His son is returning to pottery, and Dougherty is shifting to smaller projects and cataloguing his work with the University of North Carolina Archives. The transition away from large-scale sculptures is bittersweet. “I am sad,” he said, “but it’s like raising children. The satisfaction is the day you’re doing it.”
Dougherty has pleasant memories of ETSU. “I really had a good time,” he said, “and I also have a great respect for the art department and the folks that helped work on it. We had to pull the material. There's a kind of water tower somewhere — we went up there and gathered the material.” Travis Watson, the campus arborist, helped to ensure that the process of harvesting saplings would not have a detrimental impact on the campus woods.
“I remember being approached with the concept for this project and asked for recommendations on where we could source the large number of saplings necessary for the sculpture,” Watson said. “My initial concern was the impact it would have and whether there would be any consideration for what species were being removed.”
The two met to access Dougherty’s needs and methods for the project, which involved harvesting only very young, early succession species. “I was then able to identify an area of the University Woods that had a large population of white pine killed by pine beetle in years past that had a high concentration of young saplings and would benefit from thinning,” Watson said.
Local project facilitators Anita DeAngelis (then director of the Mary B. Martin School of the Arts) and Heidi Ehle (then assistant director) worked with Dougherty to decide where on campus to build the sculpture. “There was quite a consideration of whether it should be in front of the library, or where it was going to be,” he said, “We finally found a beautiful location in this little grove of trees.”
Thinking of ETSU’s Bluegrass, Old-Time, and Roots Music Studies program, and the university’s proximity to the Carter Family Fold and Memorial Music Center in Hiltons, Virginia, Daugherty had the idea of making a kind of little Church in the Wildwood.
Watson still monitors ETSU’s campus woods. He recently visited the site where the trees were harvested to look at how the forest had responded. “If you didn’t know about the project, you would never know there were trees harvested from the area,” he said. “What were small-diameter saplings are now thickening up and reaching for the sun. Tree diversity is good in this area and the canopy will continue to close as the trees reach mature height and can focus energy on expanding their crown spread. It’s an interesting section of woods where one can see first-hand the impact of pests and/or disease in a mostly monoculture stand of trees and the successional process as the forest restores balance. I feel that not only the campus community, but the forest as well, benefitted from the project.”
For Sarkodie, who helped build the sculpture, her time working with Dougherty is an indelible memory. “Honestly, every time I see something that showcases his work, I always get excited,” she said. I saw a picture of the sculptures when I was with my friend. I immediately went, ‘oh my god, I know who did that! That’s his sculpture.’ Every time I pass where the sculpture was, I always think about it even after it was torn down.”
When Sarkodie worked with Dougherty in 2013, the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine had not happened yet. Sarkodie’s childhood memories of World War II remnants in Belarus seemed nostalgic at the time.
Sarkodie recalled the bunker that her grandfather had told her was from the war, and that everyone told her not to go there. “I never went down there just because…I guess I was a curious child, but I was also a goody-two-shoes,” she said. They kept her away by telling her it was filled with a sea of venomous snakes. These days, she has adult preoccupations that are influenced by the realities of the world around her.
“I just want to settle down,” Sarkodie said. “I want to have a calm, quiet, peaceful life. You know, the American dream. But in this economy the more reasonable American dream would be comfortable, affordable housing and a good, stable job. I don’t feel like I’m an adult. I am an adult. But it doesn’t feel like I can properly, a hundred percent take care of myself.”
Dougherty acknowledges that his creative and collaborative process was unique. “The fact that (the volunteers) are not real clear, and that you’re not real clear, and together you find a way to make something great,” he said. “It exists in a moment, in the magic of trying to make something work.”
Also special about Dougherty’s work is that his sculptures are designed to decay. “Today, there is no trace of the sculpture or evidence of the team’s presence in the forest,” Watson said. “…It’s fun to see Patrick’s work in other places and know that I had a small part in one of his sculptures. It’s a nice feeling of connection.”
Shara Lange is a filmmaker, professor, and the head of the TV/film/radio program at East Tennessee State University. Her previous film projects include Empty Oceans, Empty Nests, Rehab, and The Dressmakers: Moroccan Clothes and Their Makers.
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