POLLINATOR COLUMN

Project Lead: Parker Sutton; Fabrication support: Ryan Vorndran and Jack Gruber (2021)

Pollinator Column (2021) is a functional sculpture designed to meet the habitat needs of native bees and other insects whose ecologies have been degraded and fragmented by monospecies agriculture in the Midwest. Each of its over 150 dimples is fitted with a repurposed reed of phragmites—an invasive grass—that can be replaced with each habitat cycle. The wood of the sculpture is salvaged from felled trees at Waterman Farm in Columbus, OH. After processing at the FabLab at the Knowlton SOA, the Pollinator Column was returned to the site of the wood’s origin at Waterman Farm.

Pollinator Column is the inaugural sculpture of the Prairie Baroque, a collection of landscape sculptures that respond to the habitat needs of struggling animal and insect species of Ohio. Just as baroque architectural elements vary in response to the architecture in which they are housed, the digitally designed and fabricated objects of the Prairie Baroque are aesthetically and functionally similar but take a variety of forms depending on their unique environmental contexts and performance indices. Beyond their ecological function, Prairie Baroque installations promote engagement with the landscape, acting as mediating devices between people and the landscape while revealing relationships between critical midwestern species and the environments they rely on.