GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — A curated collection of driftwood sits in the corner of a hotel lobby in downtown Grand Rapids. Smooth and strangely lifelike, the sticks recall a time in Michigan when lumber was king and Muskegon was its queen.
"I wish the wood could talk, because of the stories it could tell," said Rick Vuyst, the creator of Great Lakes Driftwood Creatures, an installation entered in ArtPrize and on display at the Homewood Suites by Hilton.
In the 1880s, Muskegon was a timber town. Nearly 50 sawmills sat on the shore of Muskegon Lake. At its peak in 1887, the city produced 665 million board feet of lumber, resulting in underwater "hills" of wood that piled up at the bottom of the lake, piles that grew larger upon the collapse of the industry before the turn of the century.
"They had a pretty poor business plan," Vuyst said. "If you cut down all the trees... you're out of business."
Over time, the scraps from this lost way of life — bits and pieces of buildings, dropped dunnage, docks and piers — returned to the surface and shore as drift lumber. Vuyst picked them up, often wading into cold water to collect. He cleaned off algae and calcium deposits with a rotary tool and let them dry in the sun.
Over time, he had enough to enter an exhibit into ArtPrize.
"I felt that I would be able to recycle them into something good," Vuyst said. “Maybe to some people, they would view it as litter or debris. I view it as beautiful drift lumber or driftwood."
Great Lakes Driftwood Creatures is separated into several sections. Tall, slender sticks comprise the "Enchanted Driftwood Forest" while large, plate-shaped pieces have been placed into "Something Fishy," for example. A fan favorite so far, according to Vuyst, has been "Birds on a Wire," featuring a flock of flightless pieces of wood arranged on a metal pipe. Another piece has audiences split: Does it look like a triceratops or a buffalo?
The secret to seeing the installation as more than an assortment of sticks is imagination, and while Vuyst took up the task of picking up and polishing the driftwood, "nature," he says, did the rest of the work.
"No question, nature is a great sculptor," Vuyst said.
Today, Muskegon Lake is much cleaner than it was when lumber ruled the lakeshore. As Vuyst has "recycled" the remnants of this former industry into a piece of art, he says something similar is happening in the city: "A metamorphosis," he said, "the cleanup of Muskegon Lake. The interest in restoration has been great for me to watch."
