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The deCordova Sculpture Garden

The deCordova Sculpture Park (archive link from September 2023), in Lincoln, Massachusetts, less than 10 miles west of Boston, is a large area with around 60 sculptures on display. There's a lot of cool and weird stuff there. The link above has detailed descriptions of many of the works that I saw.

Tom and I walked around on another nice day in October. I took a bunch of pictures.

October 19, 2023.

The previous day, we hiked around The Fells.

Displaying all 69 pictures

Best of All Possible Worlds (Doors, part 1)

Before we get to the doors, Heavy Handed (Red Piece) stands at the entrance to the park. Nathan Marbry created it in 2019 as part of his Heavy Handed series. Depending on where you stand and your background, this could be interpreted in many ways (peace, V for Victory, British up-yours if standing on the far side, or simply the number two).

Doors, lots and lots of translucent doors. It's a cool installation and the artist is also an emergency room doctor. It was near the parking lot so we saw it at the start and end of our visit. The sun was getting lower on the horizon and lit up the doors when we were leaving. But that part is is at the bottom of this page. More information on this work is here.

Tubes!

Technically, the work is called Lincoln and explores the "dichotomies of solid and void, material and immaterial, organic and inorganic." But it's a bunch of big metal tubes! And there's a path in the middle to walk through the biggest tube. There is a small sign on the far side that says not to touch or sit on the sculpture, but we didn't see that till later, and we weren't sitting on any of them, just standing on them and it's hard to do that without touching them. Below is a pretty low-quality video of me walking from the top of the hill to the bottom, following the tubes. It's pretty bumpy. There's never a dolly around when you need one. It's clear that even the small tubes are pretty big, and that they have a lot of rivets in them which would make sitting or crawling in them painful at best.



I thought it'd be cool to take a series of pictures with Tom and me in different tubes. I tried a few facing in one direction but the backlighting made everything hard to see. So we tried it from the other way and got some. I had to create a makeshift tripod.

I thought about making an animated GIF, but then decided javascript could take less time (which was true). After we took some pictures, a visitor asked me if I was the sculptor. I said no, that I was just trying to take some pictures. After she left, I spotted the sign literally 15 feet away from us that said don't touch or sit on the sculpture. Our theory was that she figured I must have been the creator of the work, otherwise I wouldn't have been violating the signs decree. But I was doing for art damn it!

If the next 3 images look too boring, like there should be some Sesame Street stop-motion animation, well, you're right. That was just the simple test and the brighter background made it hard to see. So we tried it facing the other direction, with more tube options. Using a little javascript, I made an animation of how it kind of played out in my mind as we stood in the Tubes! (animated)

Statues, Benign and Malign

We walked on a sort of garden path with various statues there, kind of the garden part of the sculpture garden. There was a nice view of the entrance with the artistic (read: weird) looking structure where the parking attendant sits. Then an odd trident thingy and a very, very shiny, little guy (which turns out to be an otter with a human head…go figure).

And then I saw Eve Celbrant. Yes, it's a bold statement on female power and strength, womanhood and motherhood, and more. But she's doing the Steet Fighter video game pose of being about to shoot a fireball (or Raiden from Mortal Kombat shooting lightning at someone's head till it explodes)!

I looked at the sculpture. I looked around.

I sighed.

I knew what was necessary for me to do. I knew no one else could do it. I knew it was going to hurt.

I needed a picture, and while I knew what I wanted to photograph, it would be easier for me to do it than take the picture. I set my camera on rapid-fire mode and handed it to Tom and told him to press and hold down the shutter button when I said go.

We recorded 3 different sequences of me jumping off the steps. I'm not completely stupid, so I was limiting my jumps. For the third sequnce I twisted in the air so I could hit the ground forward and use my arms to break the fall and I could jump a bit further out. There were some rocks on the ground and I did land on one just below my knee. It was only sore for a half day.

I was thinking I'd make an animated GIF or something, but 5 frames/second wasn't good enough. At some point I realized it'd be easier to just have a single photo that shows me in mid air. I looked at all the pictures we took and found one that had the best pose that would look OK if I cut everything but me out, rotated it and moved it so I was in the air. The problem was I had to erase me from the original picture. And that required me using bits of the background from 3 other pictures. I thought about having me hit with a fireball, but since this was a still image, there'd be no sense of motion, of a start and ending, only the fireball hitting me or maybe hanging in the air. Then I thought about lightning, since that connects me to Electric Eve. I looked up a few Photoshop tutorials and used the one that had the results I liked best. I added some small touches like shading the lightning green along with a few bits of Eve and me, and thus we got to picture 015.

There are a few artifacts of my photo-manipulation, some lines out of place or dupilcate patterns. This was not using any built-in feature of Photoshop, it was the slower, more painful way. But I liked how it looked. Then I thought about the 14 pictures that I wasn't using and figured a little composite image that gives some insight into "the making of..." might be fun. And thus we have picture 016.

The reason I signed before handing my camera off to do this was that I knew it would take time to take the pictures, edit them, and mess around. But alas, I had no choice, it was something that needed to be done.

Andy Goldsworthy: Watershed

Andy Goldsworthy is an artist who creates works of art that deal with nature and produce emphemeral effects, though sometimes on long timescales. Watershed is a stone building built on a hillside with local stone with slabs of granite that form concentric circles. The center of the circle is a pipe where water drains from the parking lot on top of the hill, and so water comes out of the central circle during and after storms. The water itself is gone when things become dry again, but it leaves traces behind in terms of erosion and mineral deposits.

I took some pictures with a flash and without. 019 and 022 are with a flash so I can see things more clearly. 020 and 021 are are without. I didn't feel like taking a ton of photos of the outside of the shed to create a composite picture of the building since it would have taken a 4x4 array of pictures to cover the whole building, since beyond the building is a downsloping hill, and I didn't want to have to deal with putting 16 images together.

I've seen Goldsworthy's work at Cornell and at Storm King, as well as in a documentary and I think the stuff he does is quite cool. I was happy to see that deCordova had commissioned him to do a work here.

In the Woods

There are a number of exhibits on the edge of and in a wooded area. I only took pictures fo two of them. The first, Jungle Prosthetics: Enchanted Forest is part of the deCordovoa PLATFORM series. The installation was scheduled to be removed after Fall 2023, and in fact at the time I was tehre only the upside-down palm tree chandelier was there, there was no ornamentation on the trees around it. That was the main motivation for me to make all the external links on this page go through Archive.org's Wayback Machine, to use links from deCordova's web site from September of 2023.

Anyway, the tree still had glass things hanging from it that glittered and sparkled in the sunlight, even from a distance. If you look at the full-resolution ("huge") version of the image, you can spot a few mini-suns with a sort of lens-flair in the image. I also took a short video of it to capture the dynamic aspect of it as it as it twinkles and glistens on command.



The other work in the woods is Joshephone Halvorson's work Measure (Tree). From one perspective, it's just another big honking pine tree. From all other's it's apparent that's it's just a big-ass version of a 2001 monolith that's having some fun with the local primates.

Measure isn't about science fiction, it's a detailed replication of the intricate patterns of the bark from a fallen tree replicated onto a twenty-four foot plank of wood. And "replicated" by hand-painting. On the back side of the plank, she spray painted a red arrow running the length of the trunk with the number 24, suggesting the symbols used to denote the length in architectural designs (synthetic setting) as well as the marks on trees in hiking trails (natural setting). This was originally created for the Storm King Arts Center in 2016 (the link to Storm King earlier on this page was from my trip there in 2013, pre-tree).

Tom wanted to show how the illusion works so well and then becomes shockingly flat and had me stand next to the tree as he walked around it. I don't like reproducing the ideas of other people, but I wanted to capture that too, so I did the same with Tom standing next to the tree. As is apparent in all of the videos I recorded her, I'm not very experienced recording videos while I walk, so it's quite jerky. Even moreso, when I stumble for a step after tripping over a real tree root while walking around. The videos are intended to show the scale or give a different perspective of the works that a single photo or even a series can't adequately provide. So I'm including my recordings—they are not art, just memory aids.

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Temporal Shift & Crazy Spheroid

Temporal Shift by Alyson Shortz was created in 2021. It has an elliptical shape that appears to depending on the viewer's position. It also looks different depending on the light. With the sun behind me, it glowed, reflecting the sun from a distance.

Crazy Spheroid - Two Entrances by Dan Graham in 2009 has walls of two-way mirrored glass, so that people see their own reflections and can observe them observing the piece, whether inside or outside. He likes to play on the feelings of inclusion and exlcusion.

Huff and a Puff

Huff and a Puff by Hugh Hayden was being constructed while we were there. Originally, we thought it was all about perspective, and that from one angle, it looks perfectly normal, while other angles show how tilted and distored it is.

Apparently that was not the point. According to the link above, it's a replica of Henry David Thoreau's one-room cabin where he wrote Walden and it's slanted because...um...to show how important that book was? And it's called Huff and Puff because...well, they don't really say, but I guess because it looks like it's being blown down, even though that's not actually related to its theme nor the Three Little Pigs story. Hey, it looks cool. And it was interesting seeing the scaffolding around it that was very straight compared to its angles. Also, two construction workers were working on it at the time. It didn't seem like either one was the artist, though given that I don't know what he looks like, maybe he was there.

Two Black Hearts and How to Annoy People

Two Big Black Hearts was created in 1985 by Jim Dine and on loan to deCordova. The bronze two hearts were cast from the same mold so they are identical other than small changes resulting` from the casting process itself. The hearts face in opposite directions the the sides facing the same direction are from opposite halves of the mold and are different. Standing between the two, looking at the two sides facing each other, it becomes easy to spot the same objects appearing in each one.

The objects include various everyday items like tools, hands, faces, and more. The tools represent the memories of the artist's grandparents, who owned a hardware store when he was a child.



The Musical Fence by Paul Matisse was created in 1980 as an interactive public artwork and was one of two fences installed outside the Cambridge City Hall. After 40 days, they were removed because it really annoys other people when someone is just whacking the metal bars with a chunk of wood. I say this because Tom and I were "interacting" with this artwork when some woman walked by and said "that's so nice" dripping enough sarcasm that it could erode a chunk of sidewalk. But it was relocated to deCordova where people can whack it with sticks all they want (and we did). I recorded Tom giving a quick performance.

Rain Gates

Rain Gates by Ron Rudncki is a permanent installation made in 2000 that uses natural elements like rocks, plants, and paths, to fit into the the landscape around it. It's built into a hill (at the top is the doors and the bottom is the parking lot), had has flowing and falling water in various places, small granite arches, bridges along the walking path, as well as a small pond. The paths around and through it, going up and down, belie its relatively small footprint. It's a cool peaceful place.

I recorded a video to capture the sound of the flowing water and the slow, circling motion of some leaves in the water. The granite gates have thin streams of water droplets flowing down forming a sort of liquid bead-curtain.

The Doors (reprise)

More doors! Well, it's the same doors as before(s), but now the sun was low on the horizon and as things got a little darker and shadowed, the doors were glowing with the light from the late day sun. I decided to take a few more pictures.

The last picture is from the steps looking down to the parking lot. At the bottom, Lars Firsk's work Street Ball can be seen at the bottom of the steps. A lot of Fisks work involves similar sized spheres. Here he contrasts the flat asphalt surface of a street, along with its markings, onto the surface of a sphere, just to fuck with people's perceptions.

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