This intervention took place in the grounds of the Beyeler Foundation and Berower Park in Switzerland. The husband and wife team wrapped the trees in breathable polyester that was opaque in direct light, becoming diaphanous when back lit by the low sun of dawn and dusk. The dimensions of this installation are difficult to pin down, the trees ranged in height from shrubs and new saplings to fully grown, long-established specimens, the largest being eighty-two feet high. Nearly six thousand square feet of the material was tied around the trees with fourteen miles of rope used to secure it.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude had been working on a grand scale in the landscape since the late 1960s. Their earliest piece on a monumental scale was an inflated fabric tube erected to a height of 85 metres entitled 5,600 Cubic Metre Package at Documenta 4, Kassel, Germany (1968). It was an ambitious engineering project that required the tallest cranes in Europe and was the largest inflatable structure ever inflated, and toyed with the notion of volume and substance. In the following year, they wrapped two and a half kilometres of coastal land in Australia’s Little Bay, Sydney in almost a 1000,000 square metres of fabric. This was understood as a work of social art as it employed more than 100 people and raised debate about access, to and protection of natural environments. Their most iconic works were Valley Curtain (1970), Running Fence (1973), Surrounded Islands (1983) and Wrapped Reichstag (1995).
Throughout their career, the couple had maintained that there was no hidden environmental agenda and their works were conceived as purely aesthetic, though they hoped that they would alter people’s perceptions of, and relationship with, their local environments that may have become familiar.
The wrapped trees are aesthetically pleasing and, as with all their wrapped projects, deal with revelation through concealment. By enclosing an underlying structure, we are made aware of the overall form – by uniting the details, we can better appreciate the whole. The added ‘twist’ with the wrapped trees is that the hidden structure is periodically revealed again by changing conditions of light. When backlit, the branches are made visible inside the translucent ‘sack’ and visually they resemble x-rays of lungs. This fractal branching structure that recurs throughout nature fascinated Leonardo Da Vinci and the correlation between human lungs and trees was also highlighted by Joseph Beuys during his huge social sculpture, 7,000 Oaks (since 1982), when he referred to them as our “external lungs”. We could not breathe air without either.
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