Installation / Land - Art, 2017
Jardin d'helys, Saint-medard-d'excideuil, France

“Pass” was created during a one month artist-in-residence program at the Jardin d'Helys. It consists of two site-specific pieces of land art that utilize trees as raw material. No external items were added to the site.

In the first piece a rectangular hole was driven through the trunk of a tree. An artifical mound has been build to stand on the necessary height. The line of sight through the hole guides the viewer to a path cutting through a forest in the distance. Next to the trunk with the man-made hole is a pair of trees that partially grew together, forming a natural hole in the process.

The second piece combines two elements: an old, dead tree leaning heavily to one side, and next to it a young one that was moved here from elsewhere on the site. They are arranged to form a union of opposites. The young tree is tilted to match the angle of the old one, and one of its branches seems to grow through a man-made rectangular hole in the old tree’s trunk.

When analyzing the work it can be understood as a series of geometrical operations on basic 3D shapes. The tree trunks can be classified as cylinders, and the holes are the result of subtracting a small rectangular box off of them. This is analogous to boolean operations on shapes in design software. In a similar vein, the young tree was cut and pasted from its original position to a new point on the construction plane. It was then rotated around one axis to become parallel to its neighbour, and rotated around another axis to align its branch with the neighbour’s rectangular hole.