For over 30 years, California artists Daniel McCormick and Mary O’Brien have been partnering to create sculptures that are both aesthetically appealing and functionally useful to their location. Their watershed-based work is specific to each site, addressing problems and degradations that have been imposed upon that site through human development and usage (or misusage). Drawing on local materials and people, the team creates projects that are remedial—creating remedies for whatever those problems are—and strengthening the bonds between people, place, and ecosystem.
Vision
Each of their projects begins with McCormick and O'Brien visiting the proposed site, where they see and learn about the land and the issues present there. They listen to scientists who they are partnering with to learn what has been observed, what caused the damage, and the technical solutions the scientists believe will make things better. McCormick and O'Brien translate this into a work of art that blends their own artistic vision and that accomplishes what needs to be done ecologically. As O’Brien has said, “We take what the science has discovered, recommends, believes is the right approach and as artists, interpret it as a remedial installation on the land.”
Environmental problems they have worked on include stream bank erosion, storm surge barriers, lack of riparian habitat, and a decreasing shellfish population. Each of these was the result of human actions that were undertaken for a particular purpose, which either did not work as intended or resulted in unforeseen and/or undesirable consequences. For instance, rivers have been straightened out in an effort to move water more quickly as a method to reduce flooding. However, this also has resulted in the destruction of flood plains, which in their natural states soak up water and make flood less likely. So when the flood plain is destroyed, there are widespread negative consequences.
McCormick and O'Brien see watershed as a central identity of any piece of land and they frame their work around the watershed. The name of their organization, Watershed Sculptures, reflects the importance of this in their work.
Method
Once they have a vision for the sculpture they will create on a particular piece of land or water, they gather volunteers from the community, which often includes schools, to create the sculpture. This community-building aspect of the projects is central to their work, for it is these volunteers who will be the ones who are still around once the artists have moved on.
Volunteers who have worked on the project have gotten tired and dirty, and have also become educated in the process about what is being done and why. They are the ones who ultimately become the long-term owners of the project, ensuring the success of the project and supporting its monitoring and maintenance if that is required. “It’s not like engineers just come in and drop off a boat-load of rocks or concrete,” says O’Brien. “We work with a big community effort on all of these.”
It is not just the volunteers who are local; the material the sculptures are made of are local, also. Rather than bring in a load of concrete or building material from elsewhere, they use what is already part of the place—what belongs there—to form it into a natural sculpture that will be a remedy for the problems the land is experiencing.
For instance, to restore an eroding stream bank in Los Altos, California, they worked with almost 100 volunteers. They wove together willow and elder berry branches, creating a sculpture named "Thicket" to protect the bank from erosion, create habitat for creatures, and act as a nursery to small plants that grew out of the woven bank.
Measuring Success
In addition to creating sculpture that captures the viewers attention and imagination, the intent is that the art stimulate the environment into greater health and diversity. Projects they have undertaken include a woven stream bank restoration, a habitat structure at a re-engineered city dump designed to attract invertebrates as a foraging source for the endangered burrowing owl, and a reforestation installation in an aging forest monoculture.
When birds come back, or the forest becomes growing more diversified with younger trees receiving sunlight, or creatures move in to build their nests within the sculpture—when nature takes over—that is what gives the artists the greatest satisfaction.
It is not the longevity of the sculpture's static appearance that marks their work as successful to the artists; it is when the works have become incorporated into nature, and have repaired some of the damage done. When it has in some sense disappeared into the environment, while contributing to a healthier ecosystem, the goal has been reached. The artists have sped along the rotting of the inside of a sculpture to make it more quickly useful to its environment.
As Mary O'Brien stated in the podcast, State of the Art, "The art-making is a process. It happens over years. What we want is that the art integrates into whatever system we have built it into. Once is fully subsumed into it, we get pretty excited."
McCormick and O'Brien were formed by the age of the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act and other legislative acts that pointed out the problems in the environment that hadn't been pointed out before. They are passionate about using their vision and hard work to increase sustainability and stewardship of the land through works of art that are aesthetic and practical at the same time. In 2024, we continue to learn about new threats to our environment. Thirty years from now, I wonder what young activists and artists will point back to as their formative motivations.
What ways have you found to integrate the good of the earth into your own work?
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Louise
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