Art in Conversation with Nature: A Moment or Millenia?

I like to think about how sculpture reflects natural process. It’s one thing to think about form, which the static sculpture presents at first look. It’s something else to think about the processes that make the form happen in the first place.

When we look at art, just like when we look at nature, we are seeing a “snapshot” of a moment in time and space. We can take it at face value or we can look deeper at the object (or the ecosystem) to try to discern its evolutionary history.

In the case of an artwork it may have been created over some hours, weeks, or years. When we look at natural form we are looking at anything from a moment to hundreds of millions of years.