In his winning entry for this year’s Turner Prize, Martin Boyce brings an autumnal park indoors and re-interprets it in classical modernist/constructivist terms.

A large room, re-designed in every detail. White columns from which flows a designed ceiling of white shapes – “trees” with “leaves” and branches. The centrepiece is a table covered in graffiti and with a hanging mobile gently swaying.  All in stark geometric shapes yet oozing a certain romanticism. On the floor lie brown leaves made out of cut paper. The ‘park’ is complete with garbage cans re-designed into unusual modernist shapes.

This installation has its supporters and its critics. It is a space that is clearly inspired by “Nature” yet re-interpreted in classical modernist language. Boyce’s skill is in taking the brutish language of constructivist art and creating something that, through angular shapes created in synthetic, man-made materials, still manages to reproduce the softness and emotional engagement that is felt when we are in contact with ‘real nature’ (whatever that might be).

Boyce is quick to point out that his work is not political but largely driven by his emotion (see video below) but I wonder where this sort of work can take us in terms of thinking about the relationship between nature and the modern world. If Boyce can reproduce the gentleness and serenity of nature in an indoor installation made out of angular, modern materials, is the conflict between nature and the modern world real or is it something that we have created in our minds? Do we have to keep presenting nature and our modern development as enemies or can work like that of Martin Boyce inspire us to break out of our entrenched positions and see more complementarity? Are we even able to consider thinking differently?

“Each walk followed my own unique, formal route, for an original reason, which was different from other categories of walking, like travelling. Each walk, though not by definition conceptual, realised a particular idea. Thus walking – as art – provided a simple way for me to explore relationships between time, distance, geography and measurement. These walks are recorded in my work in the most appropriate way for each different idea: a photograph, a map, or a text work. All these forms feed the imagination.”

Long’s work has a strong evocative power. In particular, his ‘textworks’ are often short statements that capture a particular essence of a walk. In their short but powerful form their effect resembles that of haiku verses.

Long engages with the land in a highly personal way. His work is not the type of landscape or nature art that produces generic images that fetishize and romanticize nature while lacking any personal connection. Rather, in Long’s work one can feel the intimate connection that, through his long, solitary walks, the artist has achieved with the landscape. This sort of art creates a strong impact and is more likely to stimulate us to seek our own personal connections and meanings in nature and landscape than are simple, generic images that purport to show “the beauty of nature”.

Even when exhibited in the gallery, Long’s works contain a strong, organic feel that reflect the artist’s connection with the landscapes that provide the raw materials for his gallery works.

The work of Ellen Rogers brings focus to the question of whether the human is part of, or separate from, “Nature”.

The giraffe sculpture above has the body of a giraffe, human front legs a mechanical replacement for its hind legs and is made of steel. It is an artistic chimera – an image of a hybrid creature made of man-made materials.

Ellen’s sculptures blend the boundaries between the human and the non-human. We live on the land that used to belong to animals (though we don’t live with animals) and, increasingly, they live in spaces we are trying to make out own. In such a world, pondering the distinction between the human and the natural may be irrelevant. We’re all part of one world or, as Ellen’s work suggests, one living organism, one body. When it comes to the Human and the Natural it may no longer be either/or but both/and.

Casa Batlo, Barcelona. Photo Sergio Muscat

Gaudi was a spiritual man with a great regard for nature as God’s creation. The newly consecrated Sagrada Familia “strives to compress all of earth and heaven into its structure – endless saints, biblical scenes, symbols, inscriptions, seashells, reptiles, birds, flowers and fruit.” according to Rowan Moore in The Observer. Gaudi even included in his highly decorative (if sometimes pretty ugly) sculptural details, images of the animals that were going to be displaced by the building of the huge church on the then outskirts of Barcelona. Neither are sculptural details reproducing nature limited to the Sagrada Familia – they are widespread across Gaudi’s full range of art-in-building.

Casa Batlo, Barcelona. Photo Sergio Muscat

But Gaudi also realized that nature provided more than mere decoration. His structural forms mimicked those found in nature thereby providing him with both aesthetic and functional benefits.  Columns mirroring trees or human bones, roof structures mirroring leaves, arches mirroring rib cages; all these allowed him to reduce the materials needed to build strong structures because of the supreme functionality gained from reproducing nature’s designs.

The Sagrada Familia column structures gain strength by mirroring nature's architecture

Then, of course, there is the sheer joyfulness, color and blousy expressionism of natural forms that find themselves expressed in Gaudi’s celebration of life.

A celebration of life

Gaudi transformed Barcelona into an art gallery with a celebration of life on every street. His designs were sometimes outrageous – as outrageous as the plants and creatures inhabiting a tropical rain forest. In using natural forms, Gaudi was, maybe, one of the first in what would be today called a sustainable architect. He understood that nature gives us not only beauty, recreation and joie de vivre but also wisdom – something that maybe we could all learn a bit more of today.

WHAT IS MISSING?

What Is Missing? is the title of what has been labeled as Maya Lin’s last memorial. The aim is to draw attention to the environmental issues that are facing us all today – from global warming to the sixth mass extinction of species that is currently ongoing.

The Listening Cone. California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco

In trying to bring attention to environmental issues, Lin is also re-defining the meaning of ‘Monument’.  Rather than a single structure in a single place, Lin is re-defining a monument to be a series of permanent or ephemeral structures or installations spanning the globe and linked by a common mission and a common message.

The Listening Cone (above) was one of the first installations.  A giant cone allows visitors to look into the wide end and see a series of looped videos accompanied by sounds of the marine environment – the natural sounds of the oceans.  It allows me “to create a scene that makes people realize how loud the ocean is for any sonar-dependent marine animal,” says Lin.

The Empty Room is a traveling installation that allows visitors to catch and hold projected images in their hands, each image saying something about endangered species and environmental degradation. 

Lin is planning many projects using many different media in different locations – and even virtual installations.  Future projects include ‘a sound-only sculpture’, video billboards, a peeking wall that allows us to peek through holes at video installations and even virtual media that can be downloaded onto mobile devices. To get an overview of this ambitious project visit the project’s web site.

Maya Lin has embarked on a large and ambitious vision intended to bring environmental issues to as many people as possible using modern media and formats that capture our imagination while constituting a call to action.  What Is Missing? is a work of contemporary art that, in true post-modern tradition, challenges established norms while working to change our outlook.

Let us hope that it is only some of her installations that prove ephemeral  rather than the species and ecosystems that she is trying to help protect.

How and why would one create an underwater scutpture park?

Sculptor and scuba diver Jason de Caires Taylor has, so far, created a total of 65 underwater sculptural installations in Mexico and across the Caribbean. While seeming somewhat surreal, these sculptures have a very practical purpose. They are intended to ‘spread the load’ currently borne by endangered local coral reefs by attracting divers to view these sculptural installations instead.  In additions, over time they form artificial reefs – new habitats where new coral can grow to form new coral reefs with their attendant value in supporting underwater life around them.

A video (below) shows the installation of the latest work in Cancun, Mexico.

Jason’s work may be an ideal example of how art can help conservation efforts.  His art not only draws attention to the issues but makes a very practical and tangible contribution both to conservation and coral reef restoration efforts and to the local tourist economy.  If only we could come up with more examples of this type of art.

Amazonia is an exhibit of work commissioned by the museum and shown as part of the Year of Biodiversity – 2010. The artists, Lucy + Jorge Orta have put together an eclectic collection of work based on a trip to the Amazon organized by Cape Farewell.  The exhibit contains sculpture, photography, video and installation.

For me, the most interesting pieces were some of the sculptures and the video.  The sculptures used bones and an extinct ‘elephant bird’ egg to prepare casts in iridescent aluminium (above) and Limoges porcelain (below). Viewing the decorated porcelain sculptures in particular, I wondered what they might say about our relationship with nature.  Is this a reflection of natural beauty cast in a material that we also consider culturally beautiful?  Or do they highlight our ‘use’ of nature – our appreciation of nature only in so much as we can turn it into a fetish object, a mere decoration or amusement? Do we appreciate nature for its own sake or only for its utility – one utility being its transformation into to a beautiful cultural artifact?

The twin, large scale video screens were also mesmerizing. The videos themselves were atmospheric, a feeling enhanced by the poetic narrative of Mario Petrucci (see short extract of the video here). It’s a shame that the video could not seem to avoid lapsing occasionally into spewing facts and figures and into the idolization of science.

The exhibit was an ambitious project.  It’s breadth was such that it is would put strain on any one pair of artists to deliver the expected span of content across many media. In my opinion, this strain started to show in some of the pieces. The photographs of amazonian plants, were well executed and brought a glossy juxtaposition to the coarser feel generated by the plant ‘sculptures’ rendered in sewn cloth. But the photographs did not really bring us an approach that we have not seen before in many, many photographs of exotic plants. The Madre de Dios ark (below) was, for my taste, a little too obvious. A Noah’s Ark of animals with life preservers piled underneath does not leave much to the imagination. The use of plastic animal models in the ark tended to give it all a bit of a down market, toy-like feel. But maybe my reaction was conditioned by comparison to some work by Félix Reyes that I have recently seen and that, while also using the idea of massed figures, had a quality of execution that left you breathless.

Madre de Dios

Amazonia is an ambitious project well-executed.  The artists successfully managed to produce a large scale exhibit that spanned many media and that brought to life the varied wonders of the amazon. They did so in an eclectic form that is far from usual and that represents a refreshing change from yet another nature documentary (yawn). The museum must be congratulated on commissioning this work and on having the vision to create a contemporary arts programme to sit alongside its more didactic, scientific work. I hope that other museums of natural history might take a lead from this programme and start something similar – though I suspect that we may have to wait for improved economic conditions to see that happening.

Huang Xu, a Beijing born artist, collects plastic bags from the endless rubbish heaps now to be found in China and, using 3D scanners normally used by archeologists, digitally re-models them to create these wonderful images.

Plastic bags are an interesting phenomenon of modern life. At some level, they represent economic development, technological advance and convenience. Today, they have become an almost universal symbol of consumption and unsustainable waste. Yet, they are also one of the few areas where we have seen much progress with the introduction of re-usable, re-cyclable and biodegradable bags now being widely available and in common use.

These delicate images of have often been said to evoke the imagery of fine Chinese silk – a material which evokes positive connotations. It’s not clear to me why plastic bags should be seen as a sign of excessive consumption and silk should not.

Rather than simplistically interpreting Huang’s work as a sad commentary on consumption, waste, and pollution, maybe it should lead us to reflect on the difficulty, and fruitlessness, of drawing borders between economic and technological development and excessive consumption and waste.

Loehr is a German artist that constructs complex and beautiful structures using natural materials – often seeds or flowers.

These structures are generally small – the one above is 10.5 x 8 x 8 cm but they manage to combine a feeling of immense delicacy with one of stability and even strength.

It is not clear what the artist is trying to communicate with these sculptures – if anything at all. On her web site, she gives us no hints as to her thinking behind this work.  Maybe they are meant simply to be enjoyed and appreciated as an experience with no hidden meaning.

However, when I saw these beautiful works in the flesh, I could not help but think of the delicacy and fragility of the natural world that surrounds us in spite of the fact that so much of it looks so stable, strong and invincible.  I knew that it would take just one swipe with my finger to destroy these beautiful structures – just like it is taking just one swipe of industrialized civilization to wipe out our natural world.

She describes these as ‘living sculptures…plant based systems that clean polluted water, integrating ecological revitalization with the conceptual, metaphorical and aesthetic capacities of sculpture.”

One such project is called “The Gift of Water”.  The town of Grossenhain, near Dresden in Germany, built a new public swimming complex in which the water used is filtered entirely by wetland plants without the use of chlorine or any other chemical.  Brookner’s sculpture features various mosses on a pair of large cupped hands.  The mosses purify the water of the fountain thereby reproducing the whole technical concept of the swimming complex installation while the sculpture itself represents the precious nature of the water that we use.

The Gift of Water

Some of her sculptures are more directly functional.

The Roosevelt Community Center in San Jose is a LEED gold certified building and re-cycles storm water runoff from the roof.  Two of Brookner’s installations do this filtering. In one of them (below) water is channeled into a basin-like sculpture that aerates the water as it drops into the basin below where it is filtered and re-cycled.

Her second installation in the same site brings to the surface a process that usually happens underground.  An amber glass and stainless steel rock filter system mimics the water filtration that happens naturally in the nearby Coyote Creek watershed.  A map of the creek is etched on to the sculpture.

Jackie Brookner’s work brings to life natural processes that are important to the sustainability of our environment.  Her sculptures no doubt manage to engage viewers in a way that no amount of detailed technical explanation of these processes ever could.