Beyond NYC: The Wildflower Sculpture Park

“The Essex Column” by Eric Beckerich is designed to be a living piece of work; continually evolving alongside its surroundings. It's one of nine sculptures that welcomes visitors to The Wildflower and Forest Preserve in the suburban town of Maplewood, New Jersey. 

The hollow, grey 8-foot column of repurposed construction materials and concrete stands at the entrance of the property. From one side, the backdrop is the mixed wood forest that continues into the larger Essex County South Mountain Reservation for thousands of acres. Its towering trees serve as the home for deer, wild turkeys, foxes, spotted salamanders, screech owls and hundreds of other critters. From the other side, the sculpture is framed by a trimmed lawn, planted paper birch trees and a parking lot.

Both environments, the manmade and the natural, are represented. "I asked Eric to keep the environment in mind when creating his sculpture," said Curator of The Wildflower Sculpture Park Tricia Zimic, “The background was something he considered when he made it."

Five cubes made of grey concrete, reminiscent of the material used for sidewalks, are displayed symmetrically atop a grey, rectangular platform. The material is industrial and the geometry is intentional like the paved areas of the park. The concrete skeletons of the cubes are embedded with a variety of rocks and glass fragments that look as though they have been found nearby. They range from about one to five inches wide and consist of every color in the immediate geological palette: burnt orange, off-white, light grey, dark grey, black and terracotta. The sides of the cubes have vertical bars of rusting wires and sticks positioned like a poorly built prison cell. They peer into the center of the column at a pole made of emerald green beer bottles held together by sticks and wire. The sticks are light brown and cut like the little pieces of wood that are picked up in large bags from construction stores to cover playgrounds. It blends in with the material used to build the walkway through the sculpture park. The wires look like the metal used to build the generic, silver fence that is around the preserve.

The layers of material intersect creating different patterns depending on where the viewer stands. The straight sticks criss-cross and zig-zag. The wires curve and twist. The unpredictable placement of these materials mirrors the untamed fields of wildflowers and tall, bending trees in the nearby preserve.

The column is designed to be permeable from the sides and the top so that it can interact with the natural surroundings. Leaves fall from the branches or blow through the wind and are caught inside the sculpture until they are broken down and dispersed. Rain pours through the center and out the sides. Spiders build webs in between the sticks and wire, living inside the sculpture until they move on. As the environment around the sculpture evolves every moment, and more dramatically with the seasons, the work itself is constantly changing too.