Coming to the Sculpture Park in June 2025
Set inside this shimmering multi-colored glass chamber is a coiling fern-like sculpture. To create this prismatic artwork, Kapwani Kiwanga researched Wardian cases, a predecessor to modern day terrariums which were used to transport botanical specimens from overseas to display in European cities. At deCordova, many of the trees were similarly collected from afar and brought to the landscape when Julian and Elizabeth Dana de Cordova lived here during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Perspective of an Enviromental Caretaker
In On Growth, a metal sculpture shimmers behind colored glass. Jewel-like and elusive, the interior form suggests a live fern sprouting from a forest floor. For a period in the 19th century, English Victorians were obsessed with collecting and displaying ferns and other plants in their own gardens and living rooms. Under the smog of the Industrial Revolution, Londoners gazed longingly at vegetation from colonized lands, preserved in glass Wardian cases, severed from their original ecologies. Alone and behind glass, a plant ceases to be just a plant—it becomes a commodity: beloved and iridescent yet estranged and captive.
- Saritha Ramakrishna is a writer and urban planner based in Brooklyn, NY, originally from Phoenix, AZ. She has written and reported on topics in environmental justice, tenant’s rights, climate change, and housing in the greater Boston area as well as New York City