Nursery

Nursery
2001
Steel, Copper, glass, crystallized Nickel II sulfate

The Image of the Nursery stands as symbol for scientific research or control of nature.
I wanted to create a sculpture that embodied the idea of a slowly growing picture- a still life that placidly reveals the laws of life. It was meant to be a place for the senses. A room of light that is floating like water and at the same time would be frozen likes crystal.
The Nursery that I was building had a classic house shape even though in small scale-it represents the archetype of shelter in which we find peace and intimacy.
A gardening house is associated with plants but we can attribute the idea of grows to other matter. The Italian Philosopher Italo Calvino talks in his Book Six Memos for the next Millenium about the crystal as “a form of perfect beauty that we cannot tear our eyes away from, a mode of growth in time, of expenditure of the matter surrounding it.”
Crystals with their inherited ability to spontaneous self-organization are thought to be a bridge between the organic and inorganic world. The research that I did for my final work installation Microcosm gave me a head start on chemical generated crystals.
Nickel II sulfate was my date. It is a chemical substance that is solvable in water and forms crystals when the saturated solution vaporizes.
Inside the body of the gardening house a slow metamorphosis was happening. Throughout a period of several months, water dissolved chemical regenerated crystals on the buildings glass wall. I had been doing various experiments to study the size and growing time of these chemical crystals that were circum-growing the basic structure The process took place on 28 glass plates (110x90 cm) that formed the walls of the Nursery. The light green crystals were growing in the high of 3 mm and were supposed to be illuminated only by the natural outside light. An inside space of 200 x 200 x 250 cm allowed the visitor to move freely and have a closer look at the mineral bliss.