Haystack Veil

Haystack Veil is a landscape of cut saplings, thirty thousand twigs cut and bundled into a knit veil floating over a moss and lichen covered cliff alongside the Atlantic Ocean. Haystack Veil bears on the land following primordial topography, a cloak over the earth. The project was developed as a collaboration between Philip Beesley and Philadelphia artist Warren Seelig in 1998, working with a group of textile students at the renowned Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine.

Haystack Veil was constructed on the glacier-formed shorecliffs near the school. A quarter-acre in size, the fabric is a tri-axial lattice structure made from a network of repeating sapling tripods carrying long bundled twig fibres. The fibres form a continuous meshwork floating about sixteen inches above the ground. The firmly planted feet of each tripod stand toe to toe and brace each other. This resilient anchoring makes the fabric behave like a second skin for the ground.