The dining room of Patrick and Linda Dougherty’s log house features a herringboned stick ceiling.
by Liza Roberts
photographs by Juli Leonard
It is fitting that famed stickwork artist Patrick Dougherty lives in a dwelling as magical as the colossal environmental art he creates out of swirling branches and twigs.
Deep in the Orange County woods, down a gravel driveway off a busy road, Dougherty’s log house stands in a glade surrounded by a herringboned outbuilding and a whimsical, purposeful stick fence.
What began decades ago as a one-room cabin, the house that he shares with his wife Linda, chief curator and curator of contemporary art at the North Carolina Museum of Art, has grown and evolved along with Dougherty’s own artistry.
For an artist of international acclaim, he came to the field relatively late. The UNC-Chapel Hill graduate earned an undergraduate degree in English and a master’s in hospital and health administration before heading back to UNC at 36 to study art.
A pedimented gate in Dougherty’s decorative stick fence creates a magical entrance to the area surrounding the house and outbuildings.
A stone wall the artist made by hand surrounds a burbling fountain.
Dougherty’s stickwork makes a storage building beautiful.
By the early ’80s, he was combining his love of nature with his knowledge of sculpture, art, and carpentry to create works made of saplings. Woven, spun, braided, and twirled, his massive, cocoon-like creations look like nests shot out of a hurricane. They are structures to be entered and explored, experienced and touched. Over the last 30 years, he has built more than 250 of these giant works, and shown them all over the world.
A ladder leads from the ground floor to a loft above.
Photographs of some of Dougherty’s creations hang near the bottom of a steep set of stairs that lead to the loft.
A vase of flowers brings a burst of color to a screened outdoor porch on the side of the house.
Along the way, Dougherty has added to his modest house with additional rooms and decorative elements, like herringboned stick ceilings. He made outbuildings for storage, a stone wall and fountain, and a freestanding studio. He added land and built gravel walking paths that meander through the trees.
The result, like Dougherty’s art, is a self-contained environment at one with nature: part of it, informed by it, and also otherworldly.
A handmade outhouse stands to the side.
The kitchen garden is the first sign of what’s to come as a visitor enters the wooded property from the road. Its fence, like the one that surrounds the house and its outbuildings, is enchanting but purposeful.
