Photo Source // Patrick O’Neill
By Patrick O’Neill, Staff Writer
This Thursday evening March 28, 2019, Mia Mulvey gave her artist talk at the O’Sullivan Gallery on Regis’ Northwest Campus. Some might remember Mulvey’s artwork from an exhibit called, Overthrown: Clay Without Limits which was shown at the Denver Art Musuem in July 2011. However, Mulvey’s pieces for the O’Sullivan Gallery were slightly smaller in scale yet they remained very interesting.
Mulvey primarily utilized natural forms made from 3D printed or electronically scanned images of actual forests or trees. She focused upon some of the world’s most ancient and well-known forests and individual trees such as the 80,000-year-old aspen grove in Utah called Pando and a nearly 10,000-year-old Norway spruce known as Old Tjikko in Sweden.
Mulvey’s work at the O’Sullivan Gallery was officially untitled but near the beginning of her talk she mentioned that if she were to title the work, she would title it, “Boundary Layer.” This references terminology in physics and the idea that scientific layers exist in the natural world—layers of time and experience and trees are both the silent witnesses of it all and the active participants in the world. They provide us with oxygen and life and watch as the world passes through time while they only grow higher and stronger.
For this particular project, Mulvey researched and performed fieldwork for about two years—studying ancient trees and travelling the world searching for answers. Her primary technique for her work is a method known as photogrammetry, a process in which Mulvey 3D scans trees by taking hundreds of photographs and uploading them through a software where a digital “skin” of the tree is produced.
Photo Source // Patrick O’Neill
This is one of her inspirations for the name, “Boundary Layer” and her ideas of the layers of time that exist in the natural world—many photographs create many layers to the skin she produces. The skins are then printed out as either a finished product or with room for some fine-tuned sculpting.
Mulvey also discussed the idea of thinking about the future through tree imagery—noticing the environment impact that we have on trees and preventing their damage. Mulvey’s work will be shown at the O’Sullivan Gallery from now until April 11.