Sticks brings together sixteen sculptural projects by Patrick Dougherty, built from saplings and sticks across the United States, as photographed in black and white by James Florio. Dougherty works with living material gathered near each site, raising structures that answer to their ground rather than stand apart from it; Florio, a Montana-based photographer of the built environment, returns to a place repeatedly across seasons before making exposures. The book’s title is as plain as its subject, and its 244 pages give the work room to be seen in detail rather than summarized.
The project grew out of a shared attachment to Tippet Rise Art Center in Fishtail, Montana, where Dougherty has built from local willows and Florio has photographed art and wild land for years. Dougherty’s first commission there, Daydreams, was completed in 2015; he returned in 2022 to make a companion piece. Both works center on a reproduction of a nineteenth-century schoolhouse, and the later sculpture, Cursive Takes a Holiday, wraps the exterior in interlacing branches, forming circular spaces a visitor can enter. That reciprocity between made thing and setting is the book’s real subject.
Because Dougherty’s sculptures are ephemeral, photographs carry much of their afterlife, and the volume treats that condition not as a footnote but as a question. It includes an essay by the poet Kate Farrell and a conversation among Florio, Dougherty, and moderator Jean McLaughlin that asks what it means to be a site-specific sculptor known chiefly through images, and how a photographer documents another artist’s work when the camera’s record may outlast the object. Co-published with Tippet Rise Art Center, the book is credited to Dougherty for artwork and Florio for photography, with ninety-eight images across its pages.
For collectors of photography about art and landscape, Sticks joins two practices rather than illustrating one. The collaboration has an evident history behind it, the subject is a body of work that cannot be revisited in person, and the book’s essays give the pictures a discursive frame too often absent from artists’ monographs. It is a substantial record of a sustained meeting between sculptor, photographer, and place.
