Three Shows, One Fall ArtScene: Haiku, Rockford Streets, and Salvaged Nature

I wasn't planning to have three shows in Rockford Fall ArtScene this year. These things have a way of accumulating. One project leads to another person, one conversation opens another door, and suddenly what began as a few photographs and haiku made while walking around Rockford has expanded into three different exhibitions involving photography, poetry, salvaged metal sculpture, the prairie, and several years of looking closely at the place where I live.

For Fall ArtScene 2026, my work will appear in three separate exhibitions around Rockford: Hike You! at RevHaus, a collaborative salvaged-metal sculpture at the Rockford Public Library, and SECOND NATURE at Rockford Art Deli. Although the three projects developed independently, they've ended up telling different parts of essentially the same story. All of them are about paying attention to ordinary things, reconsidering objects and places we normally overlook, and discovering that the familiar can become strange again if you look at it long enough.

Hike You! — photograph by Ryan Davis, haiku by Thomas L. Vaultonburg.

Hike You!: Six Years of Walking Rockford

The largest and longest-running of these projects is Hike You!, a collaboration with photographer Ryan Davis that grew out of six years of walking Rockford. We didn't begin with the idea of making an art exhibition. We walked. Ryan carried a camera and I wrote haiku. We wandered outward from the center of the city through downtown streets, alleys, neighborhoods, riverbanks and commercial strips, paying attention to things that most people—including us, ordinarily—would simply pass without giving them much thought.

Over time, that act of looking became the project. A discarded office chair in the window of the old Zant Office Equipment building on Broadway could suddenly evoke an entire vanished era. A mud-covered bicycle pulled from the Rock River and left standing in front of the former Rockford Register Star building became an accidental monument to lives in transition. Weather, abandoned objects, signs, animals, buildings, weeds and the strange little collisions between nature and the constructed city became our subjects. None of these things announced themselves as art. They were simply there.

Ryan's photographs and my haiku eventually began functioning as pairs. Neither necessarily explains the other, and that became important to the way the project developed. The photograph provides one way of encountering a moment while the poem opens another. Sometimes the connection is immediately apparent and sometimes it isn't. That little space between the photograph and the poem gives the viewer somewhere to enter the work and make an association of their own.

Hike You!: Six Years of Photographs and Haiku from the Heart of Rockford will be shown at RevHaus during Fall ArtScene, October 2–3, 2026. The exhibition contains 24 pieces, but behind those finished works are years of walking and thousands of moments that never became anything at all. That's part of the idea, too. Art doesn't necessarily require traveling somewhere exotic in search of a subject. Sometimes you walk out the door, pay attention to your own neighborhood, and keep walking until the familiar becomes unfamiliar again.

A Possum Climbs Onto the Library Terrace

The second project took some of those same ideas somewhere completely different. For the Rockford Public Library Terrace, I collaborated with Rockford artist and fabricator Michael Zant on a reclaimed-metal opossum sculpture paired with one of my haiku. Michael makes animals from salvaged metal, taking objects that already had previous purposes and previous lives and reassembling them into something recognizable as a living creature. Nuts, bolts, scraps, machine parts and discarded pieces of the industrial world become fur, legs, faces and bodies.

That immediately struck a chord with me because Rockford is a city that knows something about metal, but it also knows something about reuse, survival and adaptation. The industrial landscape and the natural landscape aren't really separate here. You can walk from old factories to the Rock River, from machine shops to prairie remnants, and watch plants and animals continually working their way through the human structures we've put in their path.

The opossum seemed like an especially appropriate creature for that intersection. It is one of nature's great survivors: ancient, adaptable, routinely misunderstood and remarkably good at continuing to exist under circumstances that might suggest otherwise. It's simultaneously ridiculous and magnificent, which is probably part of the reason I've always liked it. As a subject for a sculpture made from the leftovers of human industry and paired with a haiku, the possum seemed almost inevitable.

Working on that collaboration also produced something neither of us had initially anticipated. Once Michael had made one salvaged-metal animal and I had written a poem to accompany it, there was an obvious question sitting there waiting for us: why stop at one?

SECOND NATURE

That question became SECOND NATURE — Salvaged Metal Sculpture & Haiku, featuring Michael Zant and Thomas L. Vaultonburg at Rockford Art Deli for Fall ArtScene. SECOND NATURE brings together a collection of Michael's small reclaimed-metal animal sculptures with original haiku written in response to the animals, their materials and the larger ideas surrounding them. The industrial and natural worlds occupy the same space: discarded metal becomes wildlife while poetry provides another way into the creatures and their environments.

A salvaged-metal animal sculpture takes shape in Michael Zant’s workshop for SECOND NATURE, his Fall ArtScene collaboration with haiku poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg.

The exhibition is also a benefit for Wild Roots, connecting the work to the prairie and to an organization devoted to promoting it. That gives the exhibition another dimension because the animals aren't simply whimsical sculptures made from junk. They point outward toward an actual landscape and toward questions about what we preserve, what we discard and what can return after we think we've lost it.

There is something wonderfully Rockford about the whole arrangement. This is a manufacturing city surrounded by prairie country, so metal and milkweed aren't really opposites here. They're neighbors. Michael's sculptures make that relationship literal by taking the remnants of one environment and turning them into inhabitants of another. Human artifacts that might otherwise have become waste are transformed back into animals. The artificial becomes natural again—or at least begins pretending to be. Hence SECOND NATURE.

The Thread Connecting All Three

Only after the three exhibitions came together did I realize how closely related they actually are. Hike You! begins with walking and noticing. The Rockford Public Library collaboration takes something discarded and asks us to see another possibility inside it. SECOND NATURE expands that transformation into an entire little ecosystem of salvaged animals and poems. They weren't designed as three pieces of a larger project, but they somehow became one anyway.

Running underneath all three is something I've increasingly come to think of as Prairie Zen. I don't mean Zen as decoration or as a philosophy imported wholesale from somewhere else. I mean something closer to a Midwestern practice of attention: walking slowly enough to notice what's actually there and resisting the temptation to dismiss something because it appears ordinary, ugly, broken, industrial or commonplace. A bicycle dragged out of the Rock River, an old office chair on Broadway, a discarded piece of metal transformed into a possum, weeds pushing through concrete and a three-line poem can all occupy the same landscape and become part of the same conversation.

Rockford provides an almost inexhaustible supply of these things because the city is constantly revealing layers of what it was, what it is and what nature is trying to make of it now. Six years of walking around here has convinced me that finding interesting things isn't particularly difficult. The harder part is learning not to walk past them.

Somehow, that practice of noticing has turned into three Fall ArtScene exhibitions this year. I certainly didn't plan it that way when Ryan and I started walking around Rockford six years ago, and Michael and I didn't plan it when we started talking about a metal possum. But that may be the most appropriate thing about all of it. None of these projects began with a grand plan. We found them by paying attention to what was already there.