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• The Grass and the Osier
• Playing with Light
• Winter Transformation
• A Shelter in the Woods
• The River Swing
• To Vessels
• A Willow Embraced
• The Forty-Five-Beanpole Triangle
• A Clear-Cut
• A Walk to the Orchards
• The Autumn Princess
• The Castle Well I
• The Castle Park
• The Stone Spiral
• The Golden Beech
• The Enwoven Willows
• The Castle Well II
• Willows in Bloom
• The Pyramid-Tree
• A Basket Full of Willow
• The Trnovo Lighthouse
• The Woven Bottle

The Enwoven Willows

A group of white willows / Enweaving of trees

Although it is today modern and popular at each such (artistic) act to talk about installations, I could very hardly label his address with this technicistic word. The Enwoven Willows, which arouse attention even of an inattentive traveller across the Mirna River valley, mean much more than that. They signify the unity, the symbiosis of "culture" and "nature".

(Prof. Janez Bogataj, Ph.D., Willows Enwoven Round Willows)

…The aspect of time, change, development and metamorphosis of man's work in nature settings is expressed even more markedly in Popelar's enwoven willows, which each season dresses in different clothes…The Enwoven Willows can already be characterized as establishing collective poetic consciousness and therefore raising awareness of everyday living space…

(Prof. Tomáš Valena, Ph.D., About the Author and His Work)

The Enwoven Willows are a move from the solitary willow, which I had enwoven years before and was set in an out-of sight field near my home village, to a publicly exposed group of willows in the middle of the Mirna River valley. Also, they are a move from distinctly poetic metaphor of a couple of embraced trees/bodies to aestheticization and revaluation of our wider cultural landscape.

For me, the Enwoven Willows are an important step from autonomous work to socially engaged volunteer effort.

The Enwoven Willows are added symbolic and aesthetic value to the old willows – our cultural-landscape identity, disappearing from our valley due to technologies, for they lost the economic meaning they once had.

With enweaving the willows I wanted to revive and popularize the old and the obsolete craft of weaving. The weaving material and the activity itself were merged in a single place, at the willows themselves. Owing to this approach, the live willow enwoven into its own twigs became an object of visual art, and the wider landscape of the valley, its inseparable frame.

The Enwoven Willows were an endeavour to give the forgotten and the obsolete a new value and a chance to co-exist in today's day and age.

Date of Implemetation:

March/April 2006

Place/Locus:

A meadow at the Prapreče Hamlet, near the Slovenska vas at the town of Šentrupert in the Dolenjska Region

Technique:

Willow twigs, weaving

Dimensions:

A group of 24 trees

Number of Participants:

26 weavers

Implementation Process:

In March I sawed the branches off all the willows, trimmed them to get the twigs and made frameworks for baskets. When everything was prepared for weaving, I invited the locals from nearby and wider area to join me in the work. Some worked individually, others in pairs or threesomes – weaving twigs around individual willows. In a two-day voluntary work effort nineteen willows were enwoven.

Media Coverage:

Television: TV SLO1 (Magnet), TV SLO2 (Dobro jutro), Vaš kanal (Kulturna oddaja)
Press Releases: Nedelo, Rože in vrt, and the area oulet, Grajske novice

Voluntary Work Effort Organized by:

Društvo Zagon Tržišče

Voluntary Work Effort Sponsored by:

Sevnica Commune (Turistična zveza občine Sevnica)