Nature Science

HUMANS | NATURE: MUTUAL REFLECTIONS

by Rob Mulholland. Invisible mirror statues.

The impacts that humans have on nature and vice versa form an infinite mutual reflection.

Artist Rob Mulholland expresses this universal reflection in a series of human shaped mirrored sculptures. As with mirrored buildings, these forms seem to disappear into their environment. They sport the ultimate camouflage.

The pieces are made from sheets of acrylic glass (Perspex). Though practically two-dimensional, they are slightly warped, adding a lightly woozey psychedelic view of the natural world.

Mulholland’s most recent installation, “Levitate - Forest felled,” features a figure suspended by virtually invisible fine stainless steel wires. With this installation as an art intervention, his intention was to reflect the cycle of growth and harvest in the landscape.

Here, the once-dense forest has been reduced by clear-cutting. The mirrored form reflects all of the devastation back to us, saying, “Look! Look at what we’ve done!”

The reflections are not frozen in time, but rather they showcase the life as it transitions. As the artist explains, "The transition stage before new growth emerges and covers over the bare tree stumps can last for several years.”

Mulholland’s sculptures also reflect rebirth. “It’s tempting to look at this as a destructive force, but in many ways it replicates nature's own cycle of growth and rebirth as within a few years the same area becomes anew with young samplings and wild plants that would struggle to grow in the once dense woodland," he says.

As interventions, many of Mulholland’s installations are temporary. He is now planning a new series of pop-up installations that will be on location for just a few days at a time.

“Vestige,” a work commissioned by the David Marshall Visitors Centre within the forest of Aberfoyle, Scotland, calls up the faint traces of people who once lived on the land where the sculpture is installed.

"The figures absorb their environment, reflecting in their surface the daily changes of life in the forest. They create a visual notion of non–space. A void as if they are at one moment part of our world and then as they fade into the forest they become an intangible outline."

The six male and female figures represent a vestige. The work was conceived in specific response the Scottish government’s relocation of people and communities in order to exploit natural resource. Many Highland communities were forced off the land in the early to mid 18th century to make way for large sheep farms.

“Tide Flow – Time Flow,” an earlier installation at the Caol Ruadh Sculpture Park in Argyll, Scotland sits just off the shores of a lake. The reflections change with the rhythm of the tides and the weather.