SUCCESSION

In 2016 I gave myself one rule: a new sculpture every week, a different material every time — bronze, cardboard, driftwood, copper tubing, baling wire, root and branch, stone. One species of bird, wearing close to twenty different bodies.

That range of material is the actual subject of the work, not the bird. A population — or a body of work — with more variation to draw on survives change better than one without it. It's the same principle that makes a diverse prairie more resilient to drought, flood, and heat than a monoculture: many root depths, many species, many kinds of insects doing different work in the soil and on the animals that graze it. The American lawn is the counter-case, and it isn't a small one — turfgrass is the single largest irrigated crop in the country by acreage. One species, one root depth, kept alive by inputs instead of relationships. Diversity isn't decoration on top of a healthy system. It's the mechanism that lets the system take a hit and come back — the mechanism a lawn has already traded away.

Succession is where I first practiced that principle without having a name for it yet. The Living Sculptures that followed — Symbiosis, Sequel, Gust, Carbon by the Yard, CARBONsink — took the argument directly to the ground most people never question: the lawn, held in the least diverse, least resilient configuration a landscape can be in. Everything traces back to this early insistence on working in more than one material at a time.