Natural History

Natural History incorporates references to each of the natural kingdoms – animal, vegetable, and mineral – but not necessarily in expected ways.  Artist Phoebe Adams used bronze, a mineral alloy, to craft the segmented form that is visceral and pod-like at the same time.  She employed wood from the vegetable realm to fashion the dinosaur-sized bone that references the world of living creatures.  The marble base completes the circle, with a mineral originally formed from the shells of sea animals.

These circular shifts reflect both the fanciful imagination of the sculptor and the exchanges inherent in natural cycles.  Plants to derive nourishment from the soil, animals eat plants, and all will eventually return to the earth, as the marble symbolizes.  Perhaps the artist carved of the end of the bone to remind us that the works of the human hands are part of the cycle too.  Its graceful spiral evokes both the scrolled end of a fiddle and a column's crowning capital.

Commissioned by the Pennsylvania Convention Center