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-Alright. Ready?
-Installing one of John Grade’s sculptures
isn’t just a walk in the park.
-I would stop there, John. -His latest creation,
called Union, took a crew of a half dozen people
pulling... and adjusting -- -Just testing.
-...to lift 220 pounds of art.
-Go a little bit more. You’re still slack.
-And you won’t find any walls in this gallery.
This piece hangs above a path in the Washington Park Arboretum,
providing what Grade sees as a union of art and nature.
-That’s the big message, you know,
can we bring these things together,
and what does it do for our thinking about the natural world
when we see something like this?
-The sculpture, approved by University of Washington
Arborists, is bolted into eight trees
and suspended with stainless steel cables.
Union spans more than 100 feet,
with a combination of fishing line netting
and the true magic of this sculpture --
elongated ovals of blue and green resin
cast in laminated Ceiba wood.
There are more than 6,500
of these cast resin pieces in the sculpture.
They’re intended to look like the cell structure of a tree.
-John was really interested in tree cells specifically.
-That’s Quinlyn Johnson, who worked with Lindsey Champlin
as the co-leads on the Union project.
Their task was to model this sculpture
after a fallen Western red cedar
Grade found in Discovery Park
that had a trunk divided into two liters
with two very different sets of concentric growth rings.
-One had many, many more growth rings,
which were much tighter together,
and the other one had looser, fewer, half as many rings,
but doing all kinds of strange patterning and shaping.
-After creating the resin cells,
the project came together
by mimicking the outline of the growth rings,
which you can see from underneath the sculpture,
even if you’re laying down on the job.
-In the net, you can actually see there’s, like, strata
in the way the pieces are hung on the net
from, like, large to small pieces,
and then it starts over again, large to small.
-And looking closer,
no two pieces are exactly the same.
While the inspiration comes from a microscopic view
of the cell of a Western red cedar,
the perspiration comes from nearly six months
of casting work.
-When you’re doing large-scale sculpture
or work in general, you need a team.
-And it’s a team of 15 artisans
with different backgrounds and expertise levels.
-And so, that brings a lot of different perspectives
to the table, and it makes it much more interesting.
And also, there’s a lot more possible
because of all the different perspectives and experience.
-Ready? 3, 2, 1. Yeah! All right.
[ Applause ]
-Providing a different experience at the Arboretum,
a living museum with more than 20,000 plants
from over 100 countries is what Christina Owen is all about.
-I’m a strong believer that one of the keys to education
and learning is enjoyment and fun.
-Owen is director of the University of Washington
Botanic Gardens.
-This sculpture, for me,
really sits at the intersection of art, nature, and science.
-The U-Dub has been planning the sculpture for nearly two years,
and says the artwork will not have a negative impact
on wildlife.
-This is just part of one of those elements
that we can bring in to make the Arboretum a special place.
-And Owen is excited to see the special changes
Union goes through each season of the year,
weighed down by winter rain or sparkling in the summer sun.
-It looks different from different angles, too,
and it’s just that continued representation
of just everything that is encompassing of life
and in the Arboretum and in trees.
-It’s a changing sculpture for a changing world.
-I think this is very, very interesting.
It’s a different way of creating art.
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-But John Grade, who’s built hanging outdoor artwork
like this all around the globe,
has stayed grounded with one unchanging fact.
-I can never compete with a natural world.
So you’re going to get more out of a tree
or a walk in the forest
than I’m going to be able to offer.
-Wow. It’s super magical if you look --
-But that’s just one branch of the Union story.
It’s been said that great art picks up where nature ends,
but maybe art can do something even greater
when the place where nature ends is just the beginning.
-Hopefully, what the sculpture will do
is it offers something more than what I’m trying to do.
It might give you a little window into this idea
that a group of people come together
to make something like this,
and then we sort of blend this natural world in
with kind of culture and with society.
And I think that’s a nice thing to sort of,
as you’re having a walk through this space,
just sort of contemplate that after you’ve had the experience
of seeing it. [ Indistinct chatter ]
-There we go. [ Laughter ]
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