Transhumance — ushering grazing sheep or cattle across farmland — might be an unfamiliar word, but the practice is what makes our landscape so endearing. This April, in the season of newborn lambs, the group exhibition “Seasons & Cycles: Women Honor the Timeless Pastoral” at the Highland Center for the Arts in Greensboro examines this practice through multiple lenses. The exhibition celebrates Vermont’s bucolic landscape, from iconic crimson barns to lush garden beds, and entices viewers to marvel at the deeper layers of rural life: the wordless gaze of goats and the roots of a hayfield sunk tenaciously into the earth.
The exhibition sprang from Helen Whybrow’s The Salt Stones, a 2025 Vermont Book Award finalist. In it, Whybrow lyrically blends observations from her life as a shepherd at Knoll Farm in Fayston with family stories of her young daughter and aging mother. Whybrow was inspired by the late French author Jean Giono’s The Serpent of Stars, a slim novel translated by East Calais poet Jody Gladding. Whybrow and Gladding both give readings at a reception on Saturday, April 18.
By phone from her farm, Whybrow remarked that her book reveres the intuition and imagination that farm labor requires. The caretaking of animals has often traditionally been performed by women, Whybrow noted, “unpaid and unsung,” so the talents of female artists are a fitting match.
For the exhibition, curator Maureen O’Connor Burgess invited half a dozen artists who venerate the connections between humans and farm animals, hayfield and forest. With its wide windows that gaze into the former Hazendale Farm pasture, the gallery makes viewers keenly aware of the interplay between art and landscape.
Artists include photographer Dona Ann McAdams, recipient of the 2025 Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts and known for her images of political protests. She’s also a goat farmer in Sandgate. McAdams’ black-and-white diptych of a mini donkey opens the exhibit with a shot of velvety ears and swirled muzzle hair. Four additional photos from McAdams’s series “Mothers and Sisters” show nuns caring for goats. One image combines the animals and the sisters in their black-and-white habits: Who’s human and who’s goat takes a moment to unravel.
Who’s human and who’s goat takes a moment to unravel.
Brett Stanciu
Hannah Sessions, a painter and cheesemaker, owns a Leicester goat dairy. Her oil painting “Storm Moves Across Valley” exalts the wide-open farmlands of Addison County. Here, a troubled sky dominates the shadowy earth. Another work, 24-by-28-inch “Paul-Lin Dairy,” exhales frosty winter through the raised brushstrokes of pearly clouds and the particular way snow holds the rose hues of sunset. In the chilly scene, a Jersey cow stolidly meets the viewer’s gaze.
Braintree homesteader Barbara Carter’s watercolors of farm scenes are arranged seasonally with Sessions’ paintings. Discussing the exhibition with Seven Days, Burgess described Carter’s “My Last Four Ewes” as a beloved family portrait. In addition to her paintings of tractors and abundant gardens, Carter also showcases felted creatures molded from her sheep’s own wool.
Elizabeth Billings, of Tunbridge, printed brilliant blue-and-white 6-by-2-foot cyanotypes of trees. One triptych highlights a tree’s inner rings. Another features a creamy profusion of apple blossoms against indigo. She cut each one into narrow strips that she stitched to a woven backer. Reflecting on the work, Burgess said she thinks Billings brings “the calmness and the wisdom that Helen [Whybrow] does with the written word.” Billings’ work encourages viewers to linger and admire. In her poem accompanying the wall hangings, Billings refers to the symbiosis between humans and nature: “I am filled with the world trees give us, the world we are with trees.”
Wren Fortunoff, Whybrow’s daughter, created The Salt Stones’ cover and interior illustrations. Displayed together, the dozen 4-by-4-inch chapter-header woodcuts depict farm life, from a plate of lamb chops illuminated by a candle to a rolling pasture under a sky of thunderheads. Fortunoff’s prints evoke simplicity with their sparse lines. Some prints offer a view into the intimate complexities of farm life, such as a hand grasping a lamb’s umbilical cord.
In contrast to Fortunoff’s diminutive pieces, Nancy Winship Milliken’s five 8-by-2-foot panels dominate the gallery’s main wall. Each is devoted to a specific natural material, such as curly, lanolin-redolent Icelandic wool from Whybrow’s Knoll Farm; buttery beeswax; and pale horsehair. In her artist’s statement, Milliken says her choice of materials reflects what she calls “the music of pastures.”
Burgess noted that these panels encourage visitors to focus on the raw materials. A single dried blade of field grass invites the viewer to ponder both the individual stalk and the tall panel, dense with pale leaves and seeds, while breathing in the lingering scent of summer. Milliken’s description notes: “The materials represented here engage all of the senses; olfactory, sight, touch and imagined sound.”
Viewed as a whole, from the broad landscapes of pastures and mountains to the minutiae of gleaming goat eyes and fluffy apple blossom petals, this exhibition marvels at the coexistence of humans and farm animals through an admiring but unsentimental lens. Fortunoff’s woodcut of three generations — a mother embracing a child with the spirit of a beloved deceased grandmother hovering in the background — encapsulates the resonance of labor and love required for pastoral life.
Gladding’s translation of Giono’s novel describes salt stones placed by French shepherds in the early 1900s. The shepherds poured handfuls of coarse salt on flat rocks for nursing ewes and young lambs, or sheep suffering from cold or age. “[It’s] a consolation and a remedy; it thickens their fat and makes the beast’s heart a little more solid.” Visitors to this plethora of paintings, woodcuts and wool will find their own hearts nourished, too.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Sheep, Stones and Stories | Women artists revel in rural life at Highland Center for the Arts.”
This article appears in April 15 • 2026.
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