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.

“Forest Tunes: The Library” is an installation consisting of collected items, photographs, video, text and a book.

The centerpiece of The Library is a collection of items held in over 150 boxes.  Stacked in an installation that mimics a library, each box contains an item, usually a botanic specimen of some sort, from the many that the artist has collected over more than a decade.  Box by box, the collection patiently, and somewhat depressingly, builds a story of inexorable destruction of natural landscape.

A Library Of Nature Destroyed

The artist collects the specimens as part of her daily work. Each box contains a relic of nature destroyed and is accompanied by an explanation, a remembrance if you will, of the events, the damage and destruction, that led to the specimen being collected and stored.

The Library - Detail

Leaves from a banana tree (below) commemorate the cutting down of a banana plantation. Cyclamen bulbs are a testament to the thousands of natural cyclamen habitats destroyed through development and road building.  Here are some of the words that accompany these specimens:

“The Jewish National Fund does not transplant the plants, nor does it organize rescue operations to remove thousands of cyclamen, asphodel, narcissus, and iris bulbs that were found on the path of the road.  If we multiply this by the number of new roads paved over the years, the result is clear.”

Banana Plantation Destroyed

Shai Zakai has built a reliquary of nature destroyed; a memento mori to the seemingly inevitable death of all things natural in the destructive wake of human expansion. When installed in an otherwise empty space, the black shelves, black boxes and black floor create a funereal atmosphere that is the polar opposite of the life, fecundity and color of the nature that was.