CAMILLE ROOS
BERKSHIRE NATURAL RESOURCE COUNCIL
Sanctuaries
Sanctuary is a series of three outdoor installations, each engaging a different site and a different question about inner experience. The project was made by hand — woven, sculpted, painted, built — and is designed to change over time as weather, light, and season work on it. Each installation is accompanied by this website and a set of creative prompts. Responses — written and drawn — are collected here and may form a future exhibition or publication. You are part of this work. Thank you for being here.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Camille Roos is a multimedia artist and educator working across painting and installation to examine relationships among body, place, and the animate world. Drawing from ecological practice, somatic inquiry, and ritual traditions, her work moves between sensory perception and social engagement.
Sanctuary of Dreams
Site I : Thomas-Palmer Brook
ABOUT THIS INSTALLATION
What you're looking at is a real bed — an old four-post frame that was once in someone's bedroom, now rooted in the earth here. The mattress has been replaced by a landscape sculpted from clay: hills, valleys, contours that don't quite match any real place but feel familiar anyway, the way places in dreams feel familiar. The painted canvas hanging from the posts was made here, outdoors, in this light and weather. It's part painting, part curtain, part sky. This installation is about the inner landscape — the one the mind builds while the body sleeps. It asks: what does your private geography look like? Does it have weather? A season? A place you keep returning to? Take your time here. The bed isn't going anywhere.
Sanctuary of Thresholds
Site II : Housatonic Flats
ABOUT THIS INSTALLATION
There are two things here: a torii gate and a window hanging between two trees.The torii comes from Japanese tradition — it marks the entrance to a sacred space, the moment where the ordinary world ends and something else begins. Walking through one is meant to be a conscious act, not a casual one. This one is here in the middle of the trail, in the trees, to ask you to notice that you're crossing something. The window is open — no glass, just the frame, suspended by rope from the branches overhead. Whatever you see through it becomes a kind of painting: framed, chosen, held. The bells hanging from both structures ring when the wind moves. Sometimes they're quiet for a long time. This installation is about thresholds — the ones we walk through without noticing, and the ones we stand at for a long time before deciding. You don't have to do anything here except look. But if you walk through the gate, do it on purpose.
Sanctuary of Thresholds
Site II : Housatonic Flats
ABOUT THIS INSTALLATION
These giant woven baskets are lotus seats — the kind of seat a meditating figure might rest in, floating on the surface of still water. They were woven by hand from cattail leaves harvested here in late summer, dried for weeks, then shaped into forms large enough to imagine a body inside them. In Buddhist tradition, the lotus seat represents enlightenment — something that roots in mud, rises through water, and opens in the light. The seats are empty. That's intentional. This installation is about what it feels like to arrive somewhere and find the space already made for you. It asks: what does it mean to simply be still? Not productive, not moving toward something — just present, at the edge of the water, for a moment. You don't have to meditate. You don't have to do anything at all. But if you feel like sitting down beside one of these forms and staying for a while, that is exactly the right thing to do.