Art, Science, and Darwin’s Great Tree of Life
Celebrating ‘Tree’ by Tania Kovats, the first permanent public artwork installed at London’s Natural History Museum…
To commemorate the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth, London’s Natural History Museum (NHM) commissioned its first permanent installation of contemporary art. In 2009, Tania Kovats was selected from the shortlist of 10 contenders. The artist had long been fascinated with the links between landscape and culture, and often took a scientific approach to her work, fascinated by the way scientists document their experiments.
Two years earlier, she had undertaken a project clearly linked to natural history and conservation. Meadow involved moving a living wildflower meadow on a barge from Bristol to London. This echoed a project planned by Robert Smithson to place ecosystems, including mature trees, on barges in New York’s Hudson River. Although envisaged in 1970, around the time he was completing Spiral Jetty. It was eventually realised, posthumously, in 2005 under the supervision of his wife, the artist Nancy Holt, as Floating Island to Travel Around the Island of Manhattan.
