Sleeping Giants Everywhere
Taft Gardens’ Art in Nature residency 2025
Photos by Marc Alt“This year,” Cassandra C. Jones says with a dramatic pause, “everyone crushed it.”
Jones is preparing to host Taft Gardens and Nature Preserve’s highly anticipated fifth annual Art in Nature Residency Exhibition. The April 26th event will feature work from seven Ventura and Santa Barbara County artists, ranging from original music to upcycled clothing to sculpture with found materials. Each piece was inspired by and created at Taft Gardens, a 264-acre nature preserve and botanical garden in the Ojai Valley’s Santa Ana Canyon.
CASSANDRA C. JONES
ANDREW BIRD
Grammy-nominated violinist and singer-songwriter Andrew Bird will headline the event. “I've never known of a musician who sings more about nature than he does,” Jones reflected. Each year, Jones, the program’s Arts Chair, invites one artist to join the residency. This year, the invitation went to Bird, who spent a month immersed in the nature preserve, probing the environment with his violin.
“I have always been fascinated by the way sound reflects off different surfaces”
he explained. “That's always interested me. Tone has always been a big part of what motivates me — deciding what I'm going to play based on what kind of feedback I'm getting from the environment.”
His lyrics, too, reflect on the environment and human-induced climate change. In his 2019 song, “Manifest,” Bird sings:
“I'm coming to the brink of a great disaster
The end just has to be near
The Earth spins faster, whistles right past you
Whispers death in your ear
Don't pretend you can't hear”
He continues:
“For everything that's walked this Earth once living
Then to be exhumed and burned to vapor"
Notably, Taft Gardens became an unexpected haven for Bird and family in January after they fled the Los Angeles fires. Within an hour of arriving, Bird said, he’d composed a new song — he’ll debut the yet untitled work during his performance on the 26th.
Bird describes his process of composition as a type of sonic exploration. “You play every possible note on your instrument and see what's giving you the most information back about your environment. Imagine a bat or sonar or radar scanning an area and getting [feedback].”
Bird began exploring the acoustics of the Ojai Valley in 2021. Specifically, his friend’s East End backyard. “The idea [was] to go in without much of a plan because you want to use the feedback as a starting point. If the environment is wanting to hear a certain note, that's the root of your melody.” Bird’s Ojai backyard exploration turned into the album “Outside Problems” — a companion to his 2022 work “Inside Problems.”
While Bird had just four weeks to explore the gardens, Santa Barbara-based artist Eliot Spaulding spent nine months working in the nature preserve. In fact, Spaulding is a returning artist to the residency. “Her developing project — a print-making process — was so compelling that we accepted her back as our 9-month artist-in-residence,” Jones said.
Spaulding’s creative career began with window displays and interior installations for businesses like Anthropologie.
“I loved my time there. I grew so much as an artist in that job. It was a great opportunity to experiment with a vast array of materials, play with scale, think spatially, and collaborate with other creatives, Spaulding explained.
“In time, I started to have some qualms around the disposable nature of that line of work, though I always tried to find second homes for the salvageable installations. In building my own practice, I knew that I wanted to lead with a gentle environmental footprint, prioritizing reuse and natural materials.”
JOHN TAFT WITH GRANDDAUGHTER JAIDE WHITMAN
This evolving practice was entirely evident when I ran into Spaulding in late March — she was carefully taking a relief print of the bark of an old oak tree, using mulberry paper and water from a seasonal creek that runs through the preserve.
Jaide Whitman, the Executive Director/President of the Taft Gardens and Nature Preserve, found particular resonance in one of Spaulding’s relief prints. Whitman has a deep relationship with the area oaks — her grandfather John Taft founded the non-profit that stewards the land. Today, Whitman leads the organization alongside her cousin, Alexandra Nicklin.
One of the centuries-old oaks on the property, Whitman explained, is ill. Its symptom? A black-red substance oozing out from its bark. Late last year, Whitman took a diagnostic sample from the tree while Spaulding took a relief print, ooze and all.
“It moves me so much,” Whitman explained, her eyes shining, “because it's an imprint of a moment here on this land, of this old tree and this garden and this new generation of leadership trying to help and treat and discover. It's all encompassed in one print, in one impression.”
Like everything around her, Spaulding’s work continued evolving during her nine months on the land.
“A third of the way through the residency, I experienced my first pregnancy loss”
she shared, pausing briefly to take a breath.
“Upon returning to the gardens, I found myself no longer an anonymous taker of these prints. I was suddenly much more drawn to capturing the scars, marks, and evidence of loss that the trees wear outwardly, which are so beautifully expressed specifically in the bark of the oaks.”
Spaulding’s work at the gardens also includes intricate sculptures made of found materials — some of which she found in the preserve’s burn pile. Using a cactus skeleton framed by intricately woven pine needles, she draws the viewer’s attention to the plant’s interior, underscoring the beauty in what is typically hidden from view.
SPAULDING AT WORK
SCULPTURE BY ELIOT SPAULDING
Beauty in the Burn Pile
Taft’s 2023 residency, written by Andra Belknap.
Jones, too, has evolved during her five years running the Art in Nature program. Along the way, she realized something about her own art practice: she’s a curator, too. For Jones, Art in Nature is far more than an artist’s residency. It’s a community connection point. It’s an ongoing discourse. It’s permission for other artists to create. It’s an invitation to join a deep conversation about the local environment
“My mantra has been, ‘there are sleeping giants everywhere.’ You just got to wake 'em up,” Jones said. “People have said, ‘Oh, you're going to run out of artists.’ Nope. I could do this for a hundred years.”
Taft’s first residency
An artist’s record of our current state of evolution in the Determining Decade in the age of Anthropocene. Written by Ashley Hollister.
The 2025 Art in Nature Residency Exhibition will also feature new work from the following local artists. Sleeping giants are everywhere, indeed.
Ben Grace of Ojai will show cactus-inspired lamps and installations that point to patterns inherent in the garden and blur the line between sculpture and furniture.
Annette Heully of Ojai will display an outdoor installation using materials from the Australian garden. Her installation includes seed pod forms made of linen string and prints made of eucalyptus leaves that speak to her experience as a new mom.
Stephanie Hubbard of Ojai will showcase paintings and collage works to draw connections between how we perceive the land in the cultivated gardens versus the wilderness of the Nature Preserve at the back of the property.
Megan Koth of Ventura will exhibit a sustainable clothing project called "+ Koth." Using photo-negatives and a cyanotype process, Koth transfers images onto old garments in various colors to form wearable collage works.
Louise Sandhaus of Ojai will present whimsical representations of the gardens, which employ techniques like flower pressing, Riso printing, digital collage, and typography.
Louise Sandhaus’s Golden State of Mind
For more on Louise Sandhaus’s life and work from East Coast roots to West Coast reinvention, read this profile by Cassandra C. Jones with photos by Moira Tarmy.
Cover Artwork by Taft's Resident Designer Louise SandhausSandhaus and Spaulding’s work will be on display at the gardens’ art studios until June 30th.
Huelly, Spaulding, as well as former Taft Artist-in-Residence Rosemary Holiday Hall, are also featured in the Ojai Valley Museum’s ongoing exhibition Hands, Head, and Heart: Fiber Art of the Ojai Valley.
Get on the Waitlist
Tickets for Taft’s April 26 fundraiser are sold out but maybe you’ll get lucky.
More About John Taft
on Andra Belknap’s Substack: Local Hero: Long-form journalism for the Ojai Valley.
