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MARK DION:
I'm very much
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an artist who gets a lot from things.
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I really love the world of stuff.
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I am constantly out there buying
things going to flea markets
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and yard sales and junk stores
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and I like to surround myself with
things that are inspirational.
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Some artists paint, some sculpt,
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some take photographs
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and I shop
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and that's what I do.
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Sometimes those things stay in the barn
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and sometimes they enter into my every day life
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and sometimes they become part
of a sculpture, an installation.
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I really identify with the mission of the museum
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where you go to gain knowledge through things
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and I think that that's a mission that's
very close to what sculpture is about
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and what installation is about
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and what for me contemporary art is about.
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I am not looking for the newest museum.
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I am always looking for the oldest museum.
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I'm looking for museums that are very much
a kind of window into the past in a sense.
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You really get an idea of what people thought
about the natural world at a particular time.
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Their obsessions, their
sensibilities, their prejudices.
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All of my ideas start here, with
writing and drawing and sketches,
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both conceptual and practical.
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There are a lot of tools that the artist
has that the scientist doesn't have.
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Humor, irony, metaphor these are the
sort of bread and butter of artists.
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This work is about the introduction
of rats to Puffin Island,
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which is an island off the coast of Wales,
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as people started increasingly
to visit the island,
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rats kind of tagged along
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and soon the puffin colony was entirely destroyed.
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Tar has been used as a kind of form of
punishment and retribution since the Middle Ages.
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It's this sort of natural material
that has this history of a…
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as a kind of expression of intolerance.
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In the states, people used to tar
the bodies of pirates and convicts
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who were executed so the corpses would
last longer to function as a warning.
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In the middle ages, boiling
tar was used to defend cities.
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They threw it from the parapets
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so there's all sorts of associations
with tar and of history of intolerance.
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I'm not one of these artists who is spending a
lot of time imagining a better ecological future.
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I'm more the kind of artist who is
holding up a mirror to the present.
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We're at this kind of moment in time where
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we have a great test ahead of us
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in terms of our relationship to the natural world.
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If we pass the test, we get to keep the planet.
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But I don't really see us doing a
very good job of that right now.
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I'm not really interested in nature.
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I'm interested in ideas about nature.
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That's really what my work is
about, is examining those ideas–
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where do they come from, what's
the historical groundwork for them?
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I think for myself and for a number of artists,
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science really functions as our worldview.
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I mean our relationship to
science is very much like
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a Renaissance artists relationship to theology.
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That's really what I see as the
primary job of contemporary art
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is to function as a critical
foil to dominate culture.
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We're now outside of Seattle
in protected watershed area
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and this is where the tree is coming
from for the SEATTLE VIVARIUM.
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It's a very large hemlock tree which fell
on the evening of February 8th, 1996.
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In some way I want to
acknowledge the wonder of just
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the vast complexity and diversity
within a natural system.
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We'll have the real soil that
came from around the tree.
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We'll have some of the mosses, some of the ferns,
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some of the simple plants, lots of the fungi.
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There's all kinds of other stuff in here of
course that's fallen from the forest canopy
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and is trapped in here.
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So we might have hemlock seeds,
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or a whole variety of things
that are already in this moss.
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On the tree is the basis of the next forest.
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The tree supports a living biosystem within it.
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There is an aspect of this piece
that is optimistic in a sense.
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The tree is giving life through its death.
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That's part of the excitement of piece:
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once it's finished, it's just starting.
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In a sense what I'm doing is,
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I'm bringing a forgotten element of
the environment back into the city.
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I'm taking something that would have
existed here a very long time ago
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and I'm returning it to that site,
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almost a kind of reminder.
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In order to protect the tree
from the heat of days like this,
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we need to build a shelter for it.
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That's going to be one of our big jobs,
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not only putting the tree in place today,
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but also we have to build a structure
around is going to shield it from the sun
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so we're not killing off all the communities
that this place is meant to foster.
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When you're working on a project like this,
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it's really like directing a film.
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We worked with advisors, with soil scientists,
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with biologists, and with architects.
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So there's a huge team of people.
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I want to see here how it's going to line up.
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Once we get it down, we're not
going to ever move it again.
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It has to fit the building perfectly so
it's really necessary that we get it right.
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This is a piece that really
is in some way perverse.
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It really shows that despite
all of our technology,
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despite all of our money, when
we destroy a natural system,
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it's virtually impossible to get it back.
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It's an incredibly interesting hybrid
space that we're putting this tree into,
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which is something like a showroom,
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something like a classroom,
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and something like a laboratory.
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It's really exciting to see the
culmination of five years of research,
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planning, compromising, and finally
have some kind of triumph in a way.
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I worked a lot on designing the building to
have a particular kind of forced perspective.
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It's a triangular building and you
enter through the nose of the triangle,
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the narrowest point.
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When you walk through those doors,
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you are in a very different kind of place–
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a really fantastical place.
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I wanted to have this Alice
through the rabbit hole effect.
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I'm trying to motivate through
a sense of the marvelous,
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through a sense of the wonderful.
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This is not a natural space.
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This is really a very particular
kind of garden that we're making.
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We have this incredible apparatus
of a water catchment system,
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and irrigation system, cooling systems,
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panels to control the light levels.
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The glass to replicate the color
spectrum that you have under the canopy.
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We've really tried to highlight the
difficulty of replicating what nature can do.
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A number of tiles have been produced
by local wildlife illustrators.
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On those tiles are the organisms that live
in on and around the tree, lovingly depicted.
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Here are some of the early drawings.
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There's also one of the schemes for
the rainwater harvesting system.
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There are some of the tools that we
used in our collecting expeditions.
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I wanted to make something that would
exist over a long period of time
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that people could come to and they
could bring their children to,
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and their children could bring their children to.
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Every time you walk through the door, you are
experiencing something a little bit different.
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That was really my goal in this piece,
to emphasize nature as a process.
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I really expect that you leave this place maybe
with more questions then when you come in.
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One of the interesting things
about being part of the park
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is that you know here there are
these amazing masters of sculpture.
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That's a lot to live up to.
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For me it's a little bit of
an intimidating situation,
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but it also really did raise the bar for me
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when I was thinking about
what I wanted to do here.
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This is a work of art dealing
with a lot of the same issues,
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but with a very different toolbox.
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Making a piece like this, it's like having
a kid this is a lifetime commitment.
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It's a living artwork and we have
to be responsive to that dynamic.
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It's exciting.
Art21