photos from art project on abandoned bridge on edge of UMass

before:

during:

after:

a week later:


This installation was for a project on Transitory Nature inspired by Andy Goldsworthy's work. My project summary:

Ecology is often viewed as a temporal entity - constantly shifting. Human architecture is usually viewed on a much more permanent basis. But in truth both are equally temporary and permanent - all architectural and ecological entities function on long and short-term scales of time. In this case a pipe bridge was sliced into the “natural” environment of this small river. The bridge became something we generally consider a permanent fixture in this environment. But it’s usefulness came to an end and it was abandoned. It has entered a long gradual phase of decay, and the surrounding ecology began to reclaim it. This installation served to express the inverse process on the scaled-down timeframe of a week - a time span considerably-shorter, and yet not all that different in the global sense of time. The surrounding plant-life was made to encroach into the man-made world of the bridge and to “reclaim” half of it. Through the week those plant-cuttings decayed - a sped up inversion of the bridge’s lifespan. With time the bridge returned to it’s longer-scale state of architectural decay prior to this artificial “natural” intrusion. Art is an endeavor humans pursue to express something about our worlds - in this case to highlight and reinterpret the temporal nature of the interactions between architecture and the surrounding ecology - to highlight the truly “transitory nature” of those processes.





rest of set