Artist Roy Staab’s Swags in the Woods

Monday evening, Roy Staab and a few helpers had just completed two and half days of gathering nettles from beside the Milwaukee River, binding them into thick cables with  jute twine, and stringing them high in the canopy of trees near the bike trail in Riverside Park.

It was hard work. But Staab, an elfin, energetic 66, was fresh as the dew. He bounced around the fire ring and circle of low benches of the Urban Ecology Center’s little amphitheater and talked excitedly about the project.

Six cables sweep down from four corners, to intersect and interleave exactly over the fire ring. Each of them is maybe 100 feet long, with a uniform diameter of about three and a half inches. These are dense, heavy beasts. It couldn’t have been easy to place them just so and secure them 40 feet up in the trees.

How did Staab and his helpers do it?

“We tried tying a stone to a nylon rope and throwing it over the branches, but it was too high,” Staab said. “So we used a bow and arrow.”

A nylon fish line tied to an arrow gave him a lead, which he then tied to a nylon rope attached to the main cables. With counterweights and effort, they got the cables into position and secured them by tying ropes low on the tree trunks. It took a lot of shots, Staab said, but in the end he got the lines just where he wanted them.

The result is an intriguing balance of natural randomness — the locations of trees and branches, the way the added weight bends those branches, the relatively imprecise flight of arrows — and human calculation. (Staab referred to the swag shapes of the cables as “catenary arcs,” a mathematical term.)

Wind plays a role. When a slight gust rose in the still evening, the six cables swung heavily and lazily, but without restriction. Even where they interlace, Staab left enough space for them to move freely without touching.

“I wanted them to have room to dance,” he said. He thinks in theatrical terms; he called the fire ring “center stage” and hopped to the southwest edge of the ring of benches to designate the best view from the audience.

“That’s the proscenium, there,” he said, sketching in the air.

The piece is not supposed to last forever. The show is over, Staab said, “when large pieces start falling down.” That’s when he will return to gather up the nylon lines; the jute and the nettles belong there and will decompose naturally.

Monday was opening night for the piece, and after a few minutes Staab scampered across the new concrete bridge over the bike trail to the Urban Ecology Center to give a little talk.

In 10 rapid-fire minutes, he told a packed meeting room about his bow and arrow technique and about how, as a boy of 9, he’d learned to swim by jumping into the Milwaukee River from Gordon Park, on the opposite bank. He also instructed them on how to appreciate his work:

“Walk around it, lie under it, watch it on a windy day. That’s my art.”

To get there from the Urban Ecology Center, cross the concrete bridge, take the gravel path into the woods, and look for the benches and fire ring to your right. Then look up.

Staab also has a more formal gallery show up through Sept. 27 at UWM’s Inova Gallery, in the Kenilworth Building at Prospect and Kenilworth. It’s a knockout; ThirdCoast’s Kat Murrell talked with Staab about it earlier.

Photos by Joe Strini