Wayne Gudmundson : What Stillness has to Offer

July 13 - September 28, 2024

Artist Statement

Since the ice melted some 10,000 years ago, indigenous peoples have walked the land where I made these photographs. It is the meeting place where deciduous forests from the south meet coniferous trees from the north and the prairies to the west. It is also the place where two major watersheds converge, sending waters north to the Hudson Bay and south to the Gulf of Mexico. The indigenous people who lived here did not own the place; ownership was a foreign concept. Instead, they occupied it in cycles responsive to the seasons. At appropriate times, they came here to harvest maple sap to make sugar, birch for canoes and baskets, basswood for utensils, herbs for medicine, and varied woods, including the noble White Pine, for making shelter. Nearby lakes were bountiful, some with wild rice, all with fish. The woods were home to animals of all sizes. The prairies to the west were home to seas of buffalo. Within this diverse ecology, the occupants of these lands survived for thousands of years.

Then things changed. The land along and to the west of the Mississippi River was first claimed by France, then ceded to Spain and England, then ceded back to France, then bought in 1803 by the United States through the Louisiana Purchase. Thomas Jefferson’s Public Land Survey (which began in 1783) was used to divide this newly purchased land into a grid system of square miles. This was significant; creating maps that plotted the land square mile by square mile allowed it to be easily bought and sold by the white population whose capitalistic society was built on the concept of ownership. Over the next 100 years the indigenous tribes of people who occupied these lands were pushed off and moved westward. This was accomplished through treaties that primarily dealt with land; treaties that were signed and broken, modified, and signed again, and re-broken. This pattern was repeated across the United States. In 1812 in Minnesota 100% of the land was Native land, today less than 5% is in the possession of the indigenous peoples.

Yet, the land is still here. 

One tiny slice of the land I have spoken about above exists on either side of Horseshoe Road, a dirt road running three quarters of a mile from the highway—where our mailbox is located—to our cabin. Small though it may be, this slice of land is still part of that much larger history. Over the years I have walked down Horseshoe Road countless times to retrieve our mail. Last year I decided to photograph what I saw on these trips. Having done the majority of my photographic work in the vast open landscapes of North Dakota and Iceland, this decision meant that I needed to address a landscape that was literally close enough to touch. Understanding how to capture such a landscape within the four sides of a photograph was initially unsettling; I had to recalibrate my visual sense of things and figure out how to make pictures of this enclosed, almost impenetrable terrain. 

My regular photographic trips down Horseshoe Road became meditative walks where I slowly began to accept what stillness had to offer. With the internal chatter of life diminished, I was able to respond to what I saw. These responses are what you see here; photographs that are as much an echo of the history of this land as they are a tribute to its continued beauty.