Passage II

Nature Meets Art

[1]

Located in Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, artist Mark Dion’s Neukom Vivarium has been called a combination of art and ecology, sculpture and nature. The installation contains a sixty-foot-long nurse log, it is a slowly decaying piece of tree trunk that provides a home and nutrients for young plants and supports a variety of microbial life. [A] This single log offers visitors to the urban park, a glimpse into the complicated cycle of life unfolding in the forests outside the city.

[2]

Vivarium comes from the Latin word vivus, which means “alive”——a fitting description for a piece of art that exemplifies a thriving forest ecosystem. [B] Dion found the log, part of a western hemlock lying in a Washington forest, and, transporting it to the city along with some of the soil, fungi, and plants that had surrounded the tree. [C] Working with a term of scientists and architects, Dion installed the log in a specially constructed eighty-foot-long greenhouse. The greenhouse is customized with magnifying glasses and microscopes that disclose minute details of the life supported by the log. Repeated visits to the installation reveals the larger process of decay and transformation.

[3]

In the wild, this complex, interconnected system of life would have had no trouble sustaining itself. In the city, however, maintaining the nurse log requires a great number of energy and technology. [D] Humidity is electronically monitored, the soil is constantly replenished with nutrients, and sunlight is filtered through green -hued glass designed to mimic the color of a forest canopy. (25)

[4]

For Dion, the amount of work in the middle of a busy city required to sustain this ecosystem conveys an important message. According with the artist, the constant effort substitutes for what nature does instinctively, which highlights the fact that “it’s incredibly difficult, expensive, and technological to approximate that system.” In other words, nature, once destroyed is virtually impossible to reconstruct.