Lynda Frese
"Offering"
When Breaux Bridge artist Lynda Frese was traveling in Scotland last year, she noticed something peculiar: bouquets of flowers carefully placed beside “really exquisite” trees in the forest. She didn’t know why they were there. She imagined memorials, or offerings of some kind. But they felt like evidence, somehow, of her artistic theory: that nature, and the wilderness, are alive. And the trees—they are witnesses to mysteries humans aren’t privy to. Frese’s latest series, “Far Out,” which is featured in this month’s “Perspectives” column, is a contemplation on things humans do not see, and therefore cannot understand. Frese imagines the secret possibilities held within the depths of the forests, where UFOs and extraterrestrial beings might wander, known only by the plants themselves.
This space of unknowing, wherein we fill the gaps by way of storytelling or art, is a thread that runs through this year’s Myths & Legends issue. Since the dawn of time, humans have felt compelled to explain the unexplainable—granting us tales of pirates in hidden tunnels, of witches spitting out curses, of headless horsemen wandering into the wilderness. As Shanna Beck Perkins writes of the Teche Tunnel, “[This tale] is just one of many passed from porch to pew to page—each adding shape and texture to the cultural identity of the region.”
