Queen Anne’s Lace Pod, modeled after a flower that grows around the museum, is a temporary, site-specific installation by Virginia-based artist Ian Stabler.
“It’s really about how do we inhabit our environment in a more intentional way," Stabler said. "The sculpture itself is made of sticks that were found from the site, all screwed together and it’s huge. I mean it’s 8-feet around and about 16-feet tall.”
Stabler assembled the piece over month and a half last June and July.
“It is built to look like the Queen Anne’s Lace Pod. So the Queen Anne’s Lace flower is a really gorgeous flower that grows in this meadow (Potts Meadow). And when it starts to become a seed-head, it actually closes in on itself and becomes kind of like a ball. So what I did is, I took that shape and flipped it upside down so the stem is sticking up in the air.”
Stabler says visitors can go inside the “pod” located in Potts Meadow along the Harvey Run Trail in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and people can sit on a bench to enjoy the beauty of the area.
The exhibit will be on view until next spring.
Stabler’s initial inspiration for the project was a painting by the late artist George “Frolic” Weymouth - Brandywine’s co-founder - titled August, which features a hill covered in Queen Anne’s Lace flowers.
He noted that he sees the design as an homage to both the plant and Weymoth’s enduring legacy at the Brandywine.
Stabler was commissioned by the Brandywine River Museum of Art as part of its ongoing sculptural program inviting artists to explore their responses to the local landscape.
This is the fifth commissioned project in a series that also featured Matthew Jensen’s Alongside Tall Grasses (2014), James Welling’s Gradients (2015), Dylan Gauthier’s
high watermarks (2017), and Kathleen Vance’s Brandywine River (2018).
Delaware Public Media' s arts coverage is made possible, in part, by support from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency dedicated to nurturing and supporting the arts in Delaware, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.
