TREE opens

A permanent, new ceiling installation at the Museum

The Natural History Museum will unveil a new permanent artwork by British artist Tania Kovats, to celebrate the life and legacy of Charles Darwin. The new work TREE will be opened to the public on 19 March 2009.

TREE is be a wafer-thin longitudinal section of an entire 200-year-old oak tree, including the roots, trunk and branches, and inlaid into the ceiling of a mezzanine gallery behind the Museum’s iconic Central Hall. At more than 17 metres long, it will become the largest botany specimen on display at the Museum and the only contemporary art work permanently installed in the Grade I listed building. Kovats wants the finished work to create an immersive experience in the gallery, like being in the woods, where the visitor is surrounded by the inner world of this magnificent 200-year-old tree.

TREE is inspired by Charles Darwin’s iconic tree of life sketch, representing evolution, from his red transmutation notebook B. ‘When looking at the notebook, it is as if you are standing looking over Darwin’s shoulder as the thought emerges. The tree is a model of connectivity, ancestry and genealogy. Each divergence of the branching form traces change or chance, but with an origin that you can retrace. In this humble sketch Darwin was mapping out the future of biological knowledge and set in motion an investigation that we are still engaged with today’ said Kovats.

The work is a slice through a vast living organism, taken as if to be placed on a microscope slide. The work takes its place among the Museum’s magnificent collection of objects from the natural world and will be shown alongside the gilded representations of plants on the ceiling of the Museum’s Central Hall. The branches of TREE stretch across the gallery ceiling and beyond into an imaginary space, symbolising how we organise and disseminate scientific and cultural thinking, the connectivity between organisms and how the scientific gaze can penetrate the living world.

The installation highlights the creativity and contemporary resonance of Darwin’s radical thinking, reflecting the continuing challenge and inspiration his work presents to us today. In order to mark the endurance of Darwin’s idea, 200 oak saplings will be planted this year in the Longleat Estate, creating a growing monument to the theory of evolution.

The artwork was chosen in summer 2008 from the exhibition Darwin’s Canopy in which 10 leading contemporary artists exhibited their proposals to create a new permanent artwork to celebrate Darwin’s two hundredth birthday and the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. The judging panel of art, science and architecture experts were unanimous in their decision that Kovats’ response was the most ambitious and arresting, far exceeding the judging criteria.

TREE, is part of the Darwin200 celebrations, a nationwide series of events celebrating Darwin’s ideas and their impact around his two hundredth birthday.

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