Sycamore Hatch

Permanent Site-Specific Installation:
Sassafras Room, Visitor’s Center
Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest
Clermont KY

Transparent and Metallic Adhesive Vinyl 500 Square feet of glass

2020

The leaves of the American Sycamore are as big as dinner plates, yet a year’s worth of foliage is stored, in miniature, inside a bud the size of a pinkie fingernail. Using spring branches from Bernheim’s Sycamores, I hand traced fledgling leaves in the moment of bursting. In this spring moment, tiny seeds no bigger than a freckle were visible inside a leaf cluster. I enlarged these images, cut them from translucent vinyl, and connected the images with an expanding pattern of metallic copper. The work looks radically different throughout the day, and from inside and outside the visitor’s center.