Urban Forest

Leon van den Eijkel in collaboration with Allan Brown

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The Meridian Energy Wind Sculpture Walk Map View

All the trees in my city had been cut down for heating so we children didn’t know what a tree was. We had only black and white images of them. So we made urban trees from all sorts of wood, strips of cloth, broken pieces of glass and iron we found on the street.

The artist, who migrated to New Zealand from war-torn Holland, called each stack of five brightly coloured spinning cubes an urban tree, and the three together an Urban Forest.

The work, chronologically the fourth in the Meridian Energy Wind Sculpture Walk, is the result of a two-year collaboration between the artist and Hutt Valley engineer Allan Brown, who overcame the challenge of enabling cubes on a pole to spin in response to the wind.

2007
Aluminium cubes; steel mounting poles; reinforced concrete /H 3x9000mm, W site 5000mm.
Cobham Drive
With funding from Meridian Energy and Wellington City Council.