Wave Hill – The Gardens – Photography, Images and Cameras

Wave Hill has some impressive garden with the odd piece of garden art scattered around. There’s also a large greenhouse, which unfortunately we didn’t have time to visit. Above: Swallowed by Nature, by Natalie Collette Wood, 2018.

A nearby sign reads:

“Natalie Collette Wood
Swallowed by Nature, 2018
Chicken wire, repurposed furniture, plants
Dimensions Variable
Courtesy of the Artist

For over a decade, Natalie Collette Wood has been reflecting on the intersections among the passage of time, nature and the built environment. Through sculpture, collage and painting, Wood renders interiors, building facades and cityscapes as blurred spaces that visually bleed into and merge with nature. Within these dreamlike scenes, Wood probes questions about scale and permanence.

Inspired by her time kayaking on the Bronx River where human detritus, like care tires displayed here, is regularly discarded, Wood began the think about urban spaces and their relationship to natural cycles of growth, decay and change. To process and accept what she sees as inevitable, Wood transforms common domestic objects until they are almost unrecognizable. In this case, a dining room table and chairs are engulfed by hundreds of succulents that require little to no human maintenance to thrive. Uncanny and sublime ‘Swallowed by Nature’ visualizes what happens when nature is left to reclaim our built environment and “joins the dinner table”.

‘Swallowed by Nature’ is part of ‘Eco-Urgency: Now or Never’, currently on view in Glyndor Gallery.”