Steven Siegel is a sculptor and an installation artist. He works primarily from his home in Red Hook, New York, but travels regularly around the United States and Europe to universities, sculpture parks and museums to work with local volunteers to create large-scale outdoor artworks. In this interview, Siegel discusses his approach to creating these outdoor pieces, some of the ideas that inform his work, and his expectations for his visit to Florida.

Question: It is my understanding that the limitations set for you when commissioned to create an outdoor piece actually helps your creative process – Is it true that you don’t want too many options?

Answer: Unlike other artists, I work within a narrow range of parameters and I work on a continuum from which I don’t like to deviate very far. I have two to three lines of thought continuing at all times and I try to stick with what I’ve been developing. This makes it difficult to do anything radical unless there is a simple question to answer. My work becomes an outgrowth of something that has been evolving for a long time. So I guess you’d say I’m carrying a lot of baggage into a project. Additionally, materials and budget are decided ahead of time. Typically I’m working within a short amount of time on a small budget, so the designs for the project are made before I ever arrive on the site.

The Florida project is a little different because I’ve spent much more time considering materials than I typically would. It is my idea that this piece will be alive. I haven’t done a piece like that in a long time. Air plants, mosses, ferns encompassed by a sort of a container- growing from the sides. A simple shape will hold everything together. The result will be a big, living, organic object.

Question: In terms of engineering, how do you imagine creating this piece so that it doesn’t end up as a pile of organic material?

Answer: I’ve seen artists who make piles of things out in nature. That is definitely not something that I’m interested in. I am a traditional artist in the sense that I am seeking to create an object of stature, elegance and beauty. So I guess the question you are asking is how do you take moss, ferns and branches and give them form?

The answer is with a wooden armature—pre-fabricated in a wood shop. I’ll need 1-2 student assistants to help for probably the first two days of building trusses. We’ll create 12-16 identical trusses that will then be carried to the site and will encompass the entire infrastructure. This will then be wrapped with a grade of chicken wire with railroad spikes sticking out of it so that a sort of cavity is formed. There will then be an inner and outer layer. The cavity has been determined by past projects. For example a recent piece made of aluminum cans had a cavity 1 foot deep around the entire structure so that the outer skin was made of cans encased by chicken wire, while the interior was the armature and everything was held together by railroad spikes.

Question: Since the plants will be placed on an armature that is made to last for a few years, what will happen when the branches start to decompose? Do you choose plants that would root into the decomposing materials and support the piece in that way?

Answer: If those kinds of plants are available, that is what I would want to use. The idea is to create a living thing and to choose plants that can live on other plants with a root system that will hold it together. Hopefully, as the plants grow, less and less of the chicken wire will be visible.

This is an experiment. That is the nice thing about working on university campuses. It is the place for experimentation.

Question: Evolution of your pieces seems to be important to you. Do you return to your artworks to document their progress as they age?

Answer: I was visiting college campuses with my daughter and we went to a sculpture park in NY where one of my pieces is. It is made of paper and wood and is in a really deep forest. It had become this huge dark mass of paper pulp. It was amazing.

So I visit them when I can. Many of the pieces that I designed for campuses to last a year are still installed because the universities like them so much. With the paper pieces, the paper starts to change texture and color and starts to look like stone and things start growing from it such as saplings of trees and mushrooms. The real experience of the piece is living there and seeing it evolve with your own eyes.

Question: Do you have a favorite piece?

Answer: No, but after visiting the piece in NY, I look at it and wonder if I’ll ever make anything that good again. My work has gone in a different direction and I have to allow that to happen. I’m not one to make something again simply because I know I can do it well. My work is about the evolutionary process. It is about the continuum. Moving in a line, but one that actually ends up circling back on itself. At the core of my work is a sensibility and sensibility is intangible- I don’t know where it came from.

Question: You say that your work is going in a different direction. What direction is that?

Answer: About three years ago I was really struggling with no metaphor to work off of. Ten years after graduate school I was preoccupied with landscape issues. How we touch the landscape. Then I realized that the landscape was the tip of the iceberg. There is geological time and structural geology. The landscape over time. Over 4.5 billion years. Evolution. Understanding and expression of geological time.

Everything on the earth is recycled. That is a given. Recycling just is. Rocks, buildings, people- everything. People say I am an environmental artist because I use recycled materials. Good for me. I care about the environment. But that is an easy, lightweight explanation. It doesn’t require much thought.

So, three years ago, I knew it was time to move on, but I didn’t know what that meant. My work is immersed in this idea of the world/ universe/ cosmology. A large accumulation of small things. There are more stars than we can comprehend and there are even more atoms.

I think about all these billions and billions of particles that add up to everything. Billions of molecules that create life and then evolve. Though they aren’t beautiful, the cans and crushed plastic pieces are about this. They are containers. Every cell is a container. Every body is a container.

So I’m trying to emulate this large accumulation of small things and let it live.

The questions and answers included are excerpts from a telephone interview with Steven Siegel given by Heather A. Barrett, graduate student in Museum Studies at the University of Florida, on August 8, 2003.

For more information about Steven Siegel and to view his work, visit www.stevensiegel.net. Also, see Steven Siegel's page at (www.greenmuseum.org/content/artist_index/artist_id-89.html).