Ghost Forest. Installation by Maya Lin. Photo credit: from the Guardian.com
Courtesy the artist and Madison Square Park Conservancy/ Andy Romer
I have to share this installation from a colleague, so powerful and mindblower it looks.
From the article on The Guardian:
"In Manhattan’s bustling Flatiron District, 49 coastal Atlantic cedars – each around 40ft tall, leafless branches grasping at the sky – tower over Madison Square Park’s usually flat, grassy plain. The spectral forest, a new installation by the artist and architect Maya Lin, looms like a jarring holdout from winter – barren, save for smattering of lichen on each trunk, a stark contrast to the verdant six-acre park’s late-spring growth and the clean lines of the skyscrapers overhead.
The urban forest recalls the island’s pre-city past as a dense woodland teeming with birdsong and animals larger than rats, and stands as a sort of slow-rolling funeral – the 49 trees, all about 80 years old, are still technically alive but will die completely within about two years, the victim of saltwater tree rot from rising sea levels in New Jersey’s coastal Pine Barrens region.
Lin’s Ghost Forest, hosted in the park until 14 November, takes it name from the ecological phenomenon in which large swaths of woodland are killed off at once by rapid environmental degradation, be it invasive species or saltwater inundation as sea levels rise. Coastal cedars such as the 49 Lin calls her “gentle giants” used to abound on the eastern seaboard, but habitat loss and climate change have hemmed the species into now just a mere 50,000 acres."
Keep on reading:
This picture from: Madison Square Park.org
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