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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.