Outdoor
sculpture garden starts to take shape behind Hulfish Street
garage.
Quark
Park — the outdoor sculpture garden featuring exhibitions from
12 scientist-artist teams — is on a roll as it gears up to
fill the rocky vacant lot behind the Hulfish Street parking
garage.
"We're rockin' and rollin'," said
Kevin Wilkes, creator of Quark Park along with Alan Goodheart
and Peter Soderman.
The three men
previously teamed up in 2004 to bring the Writer's Block urban
garden to the same space. Though the location of both gardens
is the same, Quark Park has little else in common with its
predecessor, Mr. Wilkes
said.
Installation of the sculptures in
the garden is currently under way and should be completed by
the end of this month, he said. Though the official opening
will be held Sept. 9, the public will be able to visit the
garden in late July and throughout the month of August, he
said.
After transporting a series of
metal armatures from sculptor Nancy Cohen's Jersey City studio
on Thursday, Quark Park participants began installing the
sculptural elements that support the work Ms. Cohen created,
in collaboration with Princeton University President Shirley
Tilghman and the university's William and Edna Macaleer
Professor of Engineering and Applied Science, James
Sturm.
Based loosely on research into how
the brain receives and processes smells, the sculpture is
nothing like the realistic models of cells that students
create in biology classes across the country, Ms. Cohen
said.
"I'm not interested at all in
making a 3-D representation of a large model," she said. "It's
much more playful and lyrical — and definitely
abstract."
The finished project will
feature a curved metal wall opposite a large metal bulb, Ms.
Cohen said, connected by wires linking hundreds of
translucent, colorful objects that cover each of the two
forms. Featuring intricate engineering by Professor Sturm and
his students, some of the connecting wires will light up
unexpectedly, she said.
While the
sculpture was inspired by the body's ability to detect scents
— appropriately, she noted, the garden around the piece will
include subtly fragrant plants — it is ultimately about
connection, according to Ms. Cohen.
This
connection, it seems, is found between cells in the body and
the artists and scientists at work on Quark
Park.
"There's a lot of communication and
coordination and interchange," she said, adding that she has
treasured the chance to interact closely with other people — a
rare opportunity for people in both the sciences and the arts,
she said, who are often isolated in the pursuit of their own
interests.
"It's very exciting to enter
someone else's world," Ms. Cohen said, "to think about what
they're thinking."
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