#environmental art
Tree Mountain — A Living Time Capsule — 11,000 Trees, 11,000 People, 400 Years by Agnes Denes, located in Ylöjärvi, Finland, 1992-96.
[…] Ms. Denes is no stranger to projects that, on paper, would appear unrealizable. In the mid-1990s, she built a mountain in Finland, Tree Mountain — A Living Time Capsule creating a virgin forest sponsored by the United Nations Environment Program and the Finnish Ministry of the Environment that will be protected for 400 years. (“Other people move mountains, I build them,” she quipped, taking a shot at artist Francis Alÿs’s famous 2002 performance piece When Faith Moves Mountains,in which 500 Peruvian volunteers used shovels to shift a sand dune over a few inches.) […]
“I do very large projects because there’s no sense doing little things in the corner to teach the world what needs to be done,” […]She listens intently, training her large dark eyes on you like a hawk deciding whether you’d make a good meal. But she doesn’t mind doing all the talking, especially when it concerns her long list of achievements.
“That doesn’t really interest you,” she said with a coy smile after indulging questions about the dunes. “You want to know other things about me. You want to know why I get comparisons to Lenny.” Lenny? “Leonardo da Vinci.” She gets such comparisons largely because of her passion for science.The 11,000 trees on her Finnish mountain, for instance, were not planted haphazardly. Seen from above, they create a dizzying mathematical pattern that Ms. Denes devised using the golden ratio and the spiraling seeds at the centers of sunflowers. […]
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