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?

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.