Sarah Sze in "Balance" - Season 6 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

[SARAH SZE ] This is a project I'm working on for the High Line. It was scheduled to be demolitioned. People in the neighborhood ended up suing the city to keep it and make it a park.

I really like this idea that natural wildlife survives in this intense metropolis. They didn't change the space that much. They really just framed the wildlife that grew there naturally over the years. The piece that I conceived was a kind of habitat. You have all of these birds, butterflies, insects there, and I wanted to make a location

where you would observe them on the High Line. I did tons of research. The place that I really liked working with is the Cornell Ornithology Lab. They do these incredible urban wildlife projects, and they were really helpful to talk about how this would work and what would come to it, what might not come to it.

They're really trying to figure out how to get someone to look and observe for ten minutes, and they had said, you know, "Ten minutes of observation is an incredibly long time for a person," and this idea of slowing down and really observing, I think it's a really interesting idea also for visual art.

We're dealing with nature. We don't know what's gonna happen. Will the birds nest there, or will they not? Let's say nothing happens. It needed to be interesting as a sculpture. The thing that made me interested in the piece as a sculpture was this idea that I'm gonna put the sculpture in a location where you have to walk through it.

The walk itself becomes like a negative space in the sculpture and that you have this this very dynamic experience of it, and that you see it from far away, and then in perspective, it grows, and then you actually are in the interior of it, and then you exit. I think the high line is very beautifully designed.