BRECKENRIDGE, COLO.- Made for the 2015 Breckenridge International Festival of Art, this ephemeral sculpture was made on site, and is part of the festival’s Trail Mix series. While artists Bremner and Talty were making the piece, each afternoon at 2:30, musicians would arrive and entertain hikers and bikers who’d made the trek on the Moonstone trail that links Carter Park with Moonstone Road.

The artwork is situated on town open space where lodgepole pines litter the forest’s floor, today, having come quickly to the end of their short life cycle. Lodgepoles took over after native spruce and fir were cleared or destroyed by man-made and natural fires during the Colorado mining boom. They are still the predominant tree in Summit County's forest although vulnerable to the pine beetle.

The sculpture is titled Hume’s Guillotine. “Is” does not make “ought” - that's the gist of Hume's Guillotine, a philosophical law that prefers moral law over natural law. Having lived for a long-time in the Western U.S. where environmental issues are enormously complex, in a time when industry and tourism both want of piece of the landscape, Bremner and Talty have seen that the forest service is hard put to do what's simply right for the land. Especially when there is little federal money for building a proper forest. Our national policy is often to do nothing and wait for a wildfire.

This piece is a visual metaphor of doing - against intellectual laziness. It's intentionally dramatic and pushes for further thinking on what we ought to do.

Hume's Guillotine is installed on town of Breckenridge open space, on the Moonstone Trail, between Carter Park and Moonstone Road. It's a steep 10-minute walk from the park, or a very short few steps from Moonstone Road about 100 yards from where it intersects Boreas Pass Road.

“We made this piece in a lodgepole forest with our national forests in mind. In the West, many forests are dominated by lodgepole pines, which usually grow in a straight line, straight up. We made this piece along a popular trail in public open space, and when it was finished, the lodgepoles seem to be in a state of new growth, like a sapling or seedings, yet on a big scale. By changing the shape of the trees, we hoped to transform our understanding and hope they stimulate new ideas.” -- Steuart Bremner & Terry Talty