Last Friday morning English artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey fussed over their sculpture Specific Natures in the window of the former Mort Cooper store on State Street. The piece consists of a pair of densely molded, lifelike nudes–one male, one female–created from living grass. As Harvey misted the work with water and Ackroyd wiped smudges from the windows, they seemed a strange hybrid of shopkeepers and undertakers–the reclining sculptures looked like verdant corpses lying in state and literally going to seed. Several passersby compared the two figures to Chia Pets, but Nathan Mason, curator of special projects for the city’s public art program, isn’t fond of the analogy. As he stated at last Thursday’s opening, “I have forbidden any official mention of that.”
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Harvey and Ackroyd began working in grass independently: Harvey’s first piece was a Bible opened to the parable of the sower and impregnated with seed; he’s also created books with grass growing through their pages to be used in films by Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway. Ackroyd, formerly a performance artist, used to make props covered with the stuff. The two have been partners since shortly after they met in 1989. Ackroyd describes their collaborative work, which is often elegiacally short-lived and reliant on dying grass, as a “perverse form of horticulture.” Specific Natures and Supernatural (After Piero di Cosimo), a 32-by-131/2-foot reproduction–in grass–of a Renaissance painting, are the products of the couple’s recent four-week residency here.
The artists funded their work in part with a small grant from the New York-based Gunk Foundation, which aims to resist “the spreading grip of corporate funding for all forms of intellectual production.” States the foundation’s Web site, “It is our belief that work that is site-specific and that cuts into the space of everyday life will have the most profound effect on politicizing the public realm.” Toward that end, Harvey says Ackroyd and he turned down funding from the petrochemical corporation BP, whose logo employs a green-and-yellow palette close to their own. “Perhaps it’s foolish financially,” he says, “but it’s just not where our hearts are.”
