Vaughn Bell interview
Vaughn Bell has taken the entire idea of the man-made biosphere — that is, a closed ecological system — and brought it into the realm of the art gallery. Rather than making larger structures that humans must get inside, Bell fashions smaller versions that people can take around with them, little tiny balls of self-contained nature, like some science fiction satire. Bell gives them away for adoption — she has a “pseudo legal” adoption form and a guidebook for people who want to take on the responsibility of overseeing a tiny, self-contained world.
And she has other biospheres as well, of varying sizes with different reasons for their being, including some that hang from ceilings and allow visitors to pop their heads inside them.
Bell is currently showing at Mass MoCA in the Badlands show — this is the interview I did for an article about her work.
JM: Is there any upkeep a person has to do on these or are they pretty self-sustaining?
VB: They’re fairly self-sustaining. I get reports back from people sometimes about them. You can open them up and water them. That’s what the instructions are. You have to keep an eye on it, you can’t sit it on top of a radiator. You have to pay attention to it. If it looks like it’s drying out you can add some moisture to it or move it to a better location. The moss that’s inside, which is the main life that’s inside, it actually likes being in a little, damp space like that. It’s a hardy plant, actually.
JM: Does the moss ever try to push past the boundaries or do the boundaries define how far it will grow?
VB: The boundaries define how far the moss will go although if it was in its natural state, it would slowly spread. It does create a tiny piece of fenced off property that’s contained in this little tiny world.
JM: Some of the containers look like the eggs you get in grocery store machines, but others look like globes.
VB: I’ve used both of those, different shapes of plastic containers, and the ones that have a colored bottom and a domed top, they actually work better because they are easier to open up and take care of it and close it back up.
There’s another thing on the Web site called a portable personal biosphere that was a smaller version, really a public performance set, this little helmet that you could wear on your head. I was playing with the idea of what we really yearn for when we’re in an urban location and we feel a need — a physical and emotional necessity — to be around living things that we often don’t have in a really urban place, so this is a satire of that with this dome that you could wear over your head and it has this green horizon that was this layer of mosses right in front of your nose. You wouldn’t have to smell the exhaust fumes from the cars and everything would be muffled, so it’s a really personal piece of nature but also absurd.
