Can what is taken be returned? Opening July 11, 2025 at the Solomon Wright Public Library in Pownal, VT

“Can What Is Taken Be Returned?” 
Works by Melanie Mowinski at the Solomon Wright Public Library, Pownal, VT

July 1-August 27, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION, Friday, July 11, 2025
5-6:30 pm

“And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.”
—William Shakespeare, As You Like It

This exhibition brings together two ongoing bodies of work—Walking with Trees and Plunder Books and Things—to ask the question: Can what is taken be returned?

I collaborate with trees. I honor their splendor and listen to their stories through tree rubbings. Body and paper embrace the tree. I then use charcoal and encaustic crayons to make rubbings of their textures and scars, recording their stories. The tree leaves more than a mark on the paper. Each tree encounter leaves its mark on me.

In juxtaposition, the Plunder works reflect a consequence. They are my response to what I find: trash and debris left behind by humans in the same woods. Maybe this is a form of stewardship, an act of care, a way to transform waste into “things” and artist books. The “things” and artist books reframe waste as artifact, as material with memory. I take the negligence of humanity and give it new form.

Both bodies of work are made from the same land and attempt to engage the duality of living trees with trash found in the same place. The works reflect an intimacy with place, my place, that I have cultivated over a lifetime of walks and wanderings. Together, these creations trace a cycle of reverence and recovery. We take from the Earth—its beauty, its resources—and leave behind our imprint. How might the act of noticing, of working with what remains, become a form of redemption to some of the damage we’ve done?

Can what is taken be returned? Perhaps not fully. But in this work, there is an invitation to try.