Bamboo can evoke a lot of things to a lot of people. In the case of twins, Doug and Mike Starn, they have made Bamboo the centerpiece to illustrate their ideas about change and constancy.
The Big Bambu is a sculpture project by American artists Mike and Doug Starn and part of the Venice Biennial Art Exhibition. The central aspect of the sculpture in Venice is a 50′ tall hollow tower of bamboo, with a trail spiraling up to the top reaching a 20′ wide roof top lounge.
As Big Bambú is about the continual evolution of living things, in addition to 2,000 fresh poles harvested from a farm in France, Doug and Mike have cut several of the Fragments out of the Metropolitan (last year in New York) installation. The Starns: “We are grafting a new Big Bambú and using 1,000 poles from the Met as stem cells, the Venice piece will still be the Metropolitan piece but also a new one, Big Bambú is always growing and changing and becoming something new– as we all are.”
“It is a temporary structure in a sense, but it is a sculpture—not a static sculpture, it’s an organism that we are just a part of—helping it to move along,” said Mike Starn. “We will be constructing a slice of seascape, like our photographs, a cutaway view of a wave continuously in motion—just as our growth and change remains invariable, it is constant and unchanged.”
A quote from Doug and Mike Starn about an earlier exhibition:
…Vision doesn’t work like a camera, the mind is an interpreter of constantly fed information. Not just from your eyes, but also from all of your sensory inputs simultaneously, these are your interfaces to the world. Your mind decodes and understands the information based on a lifetime of constructions, memories, desires and learning…it is through all that that we ‘see’…”
If you want to arrange your own Bambboo sculpture in your garden , Contact Bamboo Bob for poles:
Visit idigbamboo.com for Bamboo control and landscape ideas“Bamboo Bob” Foley >