Tree, courtesy Natural History Museum
TREE, winner of last year’s Darwin’s Canopy competition to celebrate the life and legacy of Charles Darwin, goes on show at the National History Museum today (March 19), making it the museum’s largest botany specimen.
The immersive 17 metre long permanent instillation that stretches proudly across the ceiling of the mezzanine gallery is the work of artist Tania Kovats. Constructed from a incredibly thin longitudinal section of a 200 year old, 40-ton oak tree, the carefully pared-down piece contains actual roots, trunk and branches.
Kovats told Culture 24 about her "great big pressed flower on the ceiling" in a recent interview. “I had to look at the tree as if it was a sculptural form, thinking about it basically as a 3D and 2D thing,” she said of its construction. “Imagining a line drawn down through the tree and what sort of shape it would be making once you followed that line.”
She was inspired by a diagram in one of Darwin’s notebooks that depicted a tree of life with species splitting into many branches but all ultimately emerging from the same roots.
“Knowing that it’s there forever means that this moment where it arrives is quite small in its timeline, because you know that the work will exist as part of the museum like another specimen,” said Kovats.
“It makes you feel quite small sometimes as an artist, knowing how small I am compared to Darwin. The scale of the tree itself has been quite overwhelming. The scale of Darwin is even bigger.”
Witness the journey of TREE from Longleat’s sustainable woodland to the Natural History Museum in a fascinating 12 minute video from the Museum’s website.
