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