Plight of the Big Trees
The Cloned Tree
The Plight of the Big Trees” is an Environmental Art project within which The Artwork, The Cloned Tree, is one part. This project took place in Sagehen Creek Experimental Forest, University of California, Berkeley in October 2018. The Environmental Art work ”The Cloned Tree” - is specifically aimed at drawing attention to the issue’s surrounding the idea of plant cloning and the threat it possess for triggering poor bio diversity and imbalances.
Plants are organisms that can be cloned naturally and people have been cloning plants in one way or another for thousands of years. One of the main reasons to clone plants is to mass produce organisms with desired qualities. Other reasons for cloning can include repopulating endangered or even extinct species.
It is widely known that forests are one of the exemplary examples of rich bio diversity. On the other hand, problems of deforestation it is believed can be solved by plant cloning through the manipulating of their natural genes. If same species are planted, richness of diversity is bound to decrease. Natural evolution of plants, if hindered can lead to imbalance in the natural way of vegetation and growth of crops. Whatever the reasons, new cloning technologies have sparked ethical debates and will continue to do so especially when both the advantages and disadvantages are taken into consideration. Such issues will always emerge when the relationship between Art and Nature are focused upon as in the project “ The Cloned Tree”.
The intention with the project “The Cloned Tree” is to draw attention to the effects that cloning could have upon plant life and the need for conservation and to develop an Artwork/artistic expression that stretches the limits of the given material by allowing it to go through an extensive process of esthetical transformation. The act of alienation/estrangement in connection to art are practices where things are combined in an unexpected way. This can involve the taking of something recognizable, in this case a tree, and changing its appearance through a process of formation/ deconstruction subsequently reconstructing it in such a way as the known in this case a tree, reappears as something new but nevertheless recognizable.
Purely formalistically, the artists have experimented by first choosing a tree, fragmenting it and then milling it into pieces, from which two new trees, that appear the same as each other have been assembled. The purpose of this Artwork is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of this Artwork is to make objects unfamiliar.
By following nature’s own specific laws while at the same time stretching the known limits to their extremes, making the known, unknown or “Ostranenie”. The notion, estrangement is the term used in connection with this process. This form for esthetics originates from the formalists in early Russian modernism. This way of rediscovering the well-known creates at the same time function and meaning.
Location: Sagehen experimental forest, Sagehen Creek Field Station, USA
Material: Lodgepole