Time After Time, a clearing
Evergreen House Museum grounds, John Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD
2006
Materials & Dimensions:
Site rubble, trees cut on site, glass block, grass sod, enameled steel photographs, gold paint, acrylic stain
8 feet high x 20 feet wide x 90 ½ feet long
The installation was done for the exhibition Inside/Out: Sculpture at Evergreen in which artists were asked to respond to some aspect of the historic Evergreen House Museum. My site was the ruin of a greenhouse, overgrown by non-native trees and weeds. I designed this site in part as a correspondence for the bowling-alley-turned-into-a-Japanese-art-gallery that is within the estate house and is the same proportion and orientation as the greenhouse.
I cleared the site, cleaned off the rubble, and cut all invasive species trees but preserved the only two native ones: an American elm at one end and a box elder at the other. I then put in grass sod and the following details:
- The entry portal is half-alive and half-dead: the right post is living ailanthus; the left post and the lintel is cut silver maple fluted by bittersweet vine. The stockade is cut ailanthus capped with concrete tiles.
- The shadows painted with a transparent stain on the high retaining wall are an actual record of the late afternoon shadows cast by the trees I removed. Mirrors are imbedded in some gaps of the shadow wall so that it seems to have holes that penetrate through.
- The ailanthus stumps along the short outer wall are cut on a level line from the rear entrance wall to the front to reveal the grade change. They are capped with mosaics of the wall rubble.
- Five enamel on steel photographs (the type used on gravestones) are imbedded in the walls. Each gives some aspect of the history of the site. Three are photos from the Evergreen archives (an aerial view of the estate in 1920, a snow view, and the now gone wrought-iron greenhouse, circa 1930.); two I took on site of robins that had died there.
- The square glass block paving and the circle are analog commentaries on the dynamics of the site. Their formal structure reflects the estate’s Japanese lacquer box and netsuke collection (in the sense of design strategy).