WOODLANDS
“An upcoming Cutchogue art exhibit may seem unassuming on paper, but step inside the hidden world of the Woodlands show this weekend to be immersed in North Fork culture. The show is curated by two artists with intricate backgrounds inspiring their crafts.”
— Parker Schug, northforker.com
North Fork Paradise - ART is pleased to present Woodlands, a new exhibition by artists Lin Buckfield and Karine Laval opening on Saturday, September 20th at The Barn at Skunk Lane, featuring new and never before seen works.
About the Exhibition
Following their acclaimed 2024 collaboration Cosmos and Chimeras, artists Lin Buckfield and Karine Laval return for the second edition of their annual barn exhibition on Long Island’s North Fork. This year’s presentation, Woodlands, transforms the barn into a space where cultivated gardens meet imagined forests, and where the real world dissolves into the fantastical.
In Woodlands, Buckfield invites viewers into the hidden mysteries of the North Fork—a place where moonlit branches rise like cathedral spires and shadows shelter shy, tenacious beings. Known for sculptural ceramic works that blur the line between the organic and the imagined, Buckfield shapes forms that are tactile, dramatic, and often tinged with wry humor. Her “Chimera” creatures, part myth and part forest folklore, seem to peer back at us from another realm.
In her new photographic series, Laval turns her own North Fork garden into a site of alchemy. Working with mirrors and silk, she bends light, distorts reflection, and reconfigures botanical forms into images that exist somewhere between observation and dream. Her compositions shimmer with color and mood, reframing the natural world as both subject and collaborator.
Part of her ongoing COSMOS series, these works use mirrors to create a multi-dimensional vision of the garden—compressing its 360-degree experience into a two-dimensional, multi-layered plane. Laval then prints the images directly onto mirrors, adding a “fourth dimension”: a mise-en-abîme where the garden’s space collapses and merges with the surrounding environment. Frosty reflections blur the boundaries between inanimate and moving objects, producing kinetic shifts of light and shadow that alternately reveal and conceal parts of the image.
Many are printed on recycled mirrors sourced locally from estate sales, antique shops, and friends—some framed in sculpted vintage wood, others naturally distressed. In this way, the images of her garden are reflected in mirrors that once lived in the same environment, creating a sustainable loop and a dreamlike world of light and color that quietly marks the passage of time.
About the Artists
Karine Laval is an internationally exhibited French American artist based in Brooklyn and the North Fork of Long Island. Her artistic practice encompasses photography, video, projection, art in public spaces and immersive installations. Her vibrant, color-driven work explores perception, transformation, and the space between the real and surreal, merging analog and digital techniques and blurring the boundaries between photography, painting, sculpture and performance.
Laval’s COSMOS project will be featured in large-scale installations in Dior stores worldwide, including in a monumental lightbox in the newly opened Lilly of the Valley Tea Salon inside Dior Maison, part of the flagship House of Dior on Madison Avenue in NYC. She has completed public art commissions for 22 Bishopsgate (London), the NYC subway, and La Samaritaine (Paris).
In the summer of 2022, she presented a public art installation, Landscape Refractions, throughout the parks and gardens of the national museum of Château de Malmaison outside Paris. In view of the variety of her exhibition venues this past decade, Laval is an artist interested in sharing her work outside the walls of the white box, playing on the boundaries between public space and private space, leisure areas and transit areas, or places of contemplation and places of consumption.
Her work has been featured and reviewed in international publications such as Artforum, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, Harper's, Le Monde, and EXIT to nmae a few. She has received honors from the Peter S. Reed Foundation, been nominated for the Prix Pictet several times, and published two monographs: Poolscapes (Steidl, 2018) and Anatomy of Desire (89books, 2019).
Lin Buckfield is an Australian investigative journalist, filmmaker, musician, woodworker and ceramicist. Her studio workshop is in Southold. She has always had a multi-discipline career.
As an award winning documentary filmmaker her films have led to UN investigations and changes in public policy. As a songwriter and performer in the Electric Pandas she enjoyed hit records and toured extensively. She is currently recording a new album and there are gigs booked for Australia at the end of the year.
She has been woodworking for two decades and is inspired by the works of Sam Maloof and George Nakashima. Flowing lines, and the appeal to the tactile are paramount.
Her ceramics are an evolution of this practice. The appeal and potential for the unpredictable, the constant opportunity for experimentation and disaster draw a line through her pieces.
“As an investigative journalist I have to be committed to an unbiased review of the facts and to adhere to a path that can lead to uncovering injustice and holding truth to power. As an artist I can embrace the fantastic, the imperfect and the whimsical. Untethered by rules I explore the unpredictability in a process that begins the moment my hands feel the clay, the wood or pick up a guitar.” --Lin Buckfield
The Barn at Skunk Lane
The Barn at Skunk Lane is a historic barn built in the 1890’s in Cutchogue, NY. The Barn was brought back to life by the new owners Sarah Mastracco and Jonathan Baker in the summer of 2018. After years of neglect it has been transformed into a truly magical place.
COSMOS & CHIMERAS
“Cosmos & Chimeras” brings together two artists who both explore and create fantastical worlds by pushing the boundaries of photography and sculpture.
North Fork Paradise - ART is pleased to present a pop-up art exhibition featuring new and never before seen works by LIN BUCKFIELD and KARINE LAVAL.
About the Exhibition
The alchemy of the work of both artists reveals their shared metaphysical interests. The essence of the exhibition lies in the relationship between two bodies of work that seek an altered world, using iconography of both nature and culture.
Buckfield’s Chimeras sculptures could be out of a fairy tale. They are built with a naïve playfulness and ease; yet, they characterize scary monsters that might live in the dense vegetation and wet dungeons of enchanted forests and otherworldly landscapes, quite possibly the Cosmos landscapes created by Karine Laval. With the fabrication of their fantastical environments, each artist in her own way is taking control of the world.
Cosmos is a new chapter of Laval’s ongoing decade-long project Heterotopia, for which she captures public and private gardens around the world and transforms them into imaginary landscapes through analog manipulations and experimentation. Cosmos focuses on her own garden on the North Fork of Long Island. With this new series Laval is also intervening in the landscape by integrating landscaping, gardening and art making as she’s slowly transforming part of the space into a sustainable environment of meadows and fields of wildflowers with different "stations”. She is using her own piece of land as a giant outdoor studio. Laval has been documenting the process for the past year through the seasons and will present a selection of still and moving images from this new ongoing project.
About the Artists
Karine Laval is an internationally exhibited French American artist based in Brooklyn and the North Fork of Long Island. Her artistic practice encompasses photography, video, projection, art in public spaces and immersive installations. The original and deliberate use and manipulation of color helps to question the relationship between representation and reality.
Laval’s still and moving images often challenge the familiar perception we have of the world and explore the notion of space, not only as a physical and geographical place, but also as a psychological and imaginary space that includes our relationship to the environment, at the intersection of nature and culture.
Laval has worked on commissions for prestigious brands such as Hermès and Louis Vuitton, architects and institutions. Some of her recent public art commissions include a monumental scale installation at 22 Bishopsgate in London, an exhibition of large light boxes in the New York City subway commissioned by the MTA Arts and Design and commissions by Peter Marino, such as for the Cheval Blanc hotel in the newly renovated La Samaritaine in Paris.
In the summer of 2022, she presented a public art installation, Landscape Refractions, throughout the parks and gardens of the national museum of Château de Malmaison outside Paris. In view of the variety of her exhibition venues this past decade, Laval is an artist interested in sharing her work outside the walls of the white box, playing on the boundaries between public space and private space, leisure areas and transit areas, or places of contemplation and places of consumption.
Her work has been reviewed and featured in international publications such as Artforum, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper's, Le Monde, and EXIT, to name a few. Steidl published her first monograph Poolscapes in 2018. The Italian book publisher 89books published Anatomy of Desire in 2019.
Lin Buckfield is an Australian investigative journalist, filmmaker, musician, woodworker and ceramicist. Her studio workshop is in Southold. She has always had a multi-discipline career.
As an award winning documentary filmmaker her films have led to UN investigations and changes in public policy. As a songwriter and performer in the Electric Pandas she enjoyed hit records and toured extensively. She is currently recording a new album and there are gigs booked for Australia at the end of the year.
She has been woodworking for two decades and is inspired by the works of Sam Maloof and George Nakashima. Flowing lines, and the appeal to the tactile are paramount.
Her ceramics are an evolution of this practice. The appeal and potential for the unpredictable, the constant opportunity for experimentation and disaster draw a line through her pieces.
“As an investigative journalist I have to be committed to an unbiased review of the facts and to adhere to a path that can lead to uncovering injustice and holding truth to power. As an artist I can embrace the fantastic, the imperfect and the whimsical. Untethered by rules I explore the unpredictability in a process that begins the moment my hands feel the clay, the wood or pick up a guitar.” --Lin Buckfield
