Michael Pearce

      

There are some interesting choices at the mall. I particularly like the oak tree idea, as it ties in to the reading I’ve been doing on alchemy. Alternatively I have been imagining a teardrop made of the bottles suspended from an archway or roof. 

The water bottle theme got me thinking about the elements, air, earth, fire and water. How could I express them all in the piece? I realized that everyone associates the ubiquitous transparent bottle with water, fire can be expressed by using ashes, earth by using stones, and air is ever present and contained in the bottles. So if each bottle contains a quantity of each element, suspended from the tree at at a uniform height we have the plane of this earth, the celestial world is above the elements,  and below them the lower world.

The oak tree becomes the axis mundi with its roots in the underworld, its branches in the heavens. 

I dreamed about a tree with bottles hanging from it on the same plane about a year ago, and made a sketch in my book. I guess this is what it was for. 

I’ve been asked to create an installation for the Simi Valley Town Centre to celebrate Earth Day. Each year an average family will use as much as 836 bottles of water. Most of those bottles end up as land fill.

I want to draw attention to the problem by suspending the bottles in the air from the branches of an ancient oak. I need to find several students who are committed to helping maintain sustainable resources who are willing to get involved with making the installation a reality. Four challenges face us:

First Challenge: to collect 836 empty (and clean) 1 litre water bottles, and remove their corporate labeling.
Second Challenge: add ashes and stones into each bottle
Third challenge: to suspend the bottles from a beautiful oak tree in the Simi Valley town centre, using fishing line
Fourth challenge: When it’s over, take it all down and store it.

I can’t wait to get started on the project. I’m interested in the potential here for the symbolism of the cycle of the elements: fire, air, earth and water. Each bottle (water) will contain ash (fire) stone (earth) and air. The world tree will suspend the bottles in the plane between the upper and lower worlds.