Erich Franz:
Maria Nordman – De Civitate, Münster 1991

Maria Nordman’s works are impossible to survey from a distance or take in at a single glance. Ever since her first sculptures of fire (Garden of Smokeless Fire, 1967) and smoke (City of the Clouds, 1967), the "body" of her sculptures has at the same time been the "space" of the viewer. Her work is public in its substance; it is a space with people in the city. Inside and outside, work and viewer, sculpture and space, art and reality are not disconnected in her sculptures, drawings, structures, and space projects; rather, they permeate one another, cooperate with and influence each other, become elements of one another. The sculpture De Civitate is saturated, as it were, with its surroundings - with the park and fields opening up on all sides, with the space of the viewers’ movement and their penetrating, changing gazes, with the light of the sun and the moon, with the air and the rain, with the ground that nourishes the plants, and with the plants’ activities and reactions to light, climate, and the seasons.

The arrangement of trees on a lawn in three sections running parallel to a path is a communicative, inclusive, and open sculpture, yet it is still a sculpture: a visually perceptible body in space, surrounded on all sides by open areas, defined and constructed internally according to a formal geometry, and made of a lasting material - trees with a long life. But not only is this sculpture surrounded by space, it is filled with it; space and sculpture are in fact indistinguishable. The life principle of the plant, the osmosis through the cell walls, constitutes the design principle of this sculpture as well: its form can only be perceived and experienced as an interchange between interior and exterior, to the point of negating the distinction. The life of plants and the light of the sun stand in a reciprocal relationship to each other, and through the open, gradually expanding geometry of the visible forms, this absorption and transformation is turned into a visual, sculptural experience, Its fixed form brings the changes in the plant and the changes in the light into contact with another kind of change: the processuality of human sense experience (sight, but also exploratory movement and touch, with the images and memories associated with them). The crucial element is the openness of these geometric arrangements, which in different ways also incorporate "exterior" space.

The sculpture is likewise filled with time: in its fixed form it does not stand outside of time, but rather incorporates it as process and change. The alternation of day and night, winter and summer, takes place within the sculpture; the movement of growth and the development of life belongs to it. There is also tranquillity and perpetuity - not as timeless rigidity, but as gradations of slowness: the evergreen of the Thuja tree, the seasonally changing "needles" of the metasequoia, and the ancient Ginkgo biloba, a primitive, fan-leaved tree that has remained unchanged for 270 million years and that has reached ages of up to 1000 years in China. In the sculptural "material" of the trees, the experience of permanence - over the course of days, seasons, years, millennia, millions of years - is here freed from petrification: permanence as change, changing permanence.

Very slowly, without contrasting hardness, the geometry comes to life in a free, open process of growth, a geometry that the eye first apprehends as design; then vision itself comes to life, unifying design and growth, sculpture and nature, the space of seeing and the space of movement. For the most part the Thuja trees are planted so thickly that they form walls, chambers and spaces that one can enter, boundaries and openings for the human body, here above all for children. The other two sections (with trees that renew their foliage yearly) lie parallel to the straight course of the path (here, too, there is interpenetration of boundary and opening); these sections are surrounded by avenue-like double rows of deciduous trees in a U-form, oriented in opposite directions. Both the gaze and the sunlight penetrate the rows in rhythmic sequence. The avenues leading away from the path focus the direction of both sight and shadow; in the midday sun, the shadows form a single line running exactly north-south along the course of the avenues. One U-form thus turns toward the midday sun, the shadows form a single line running exactly north-south thus turns toward the midday sun, the other toward midnight. The visual scale expands in stages - from the surveyable and see-able, to the unity of the three sections that can no longer be apprehended in a single glance, to the space "above" (in the direction of the branches) and "below" (the roots), to the space of the sun, the source of the light that moves through the rotation of the earth, and lastly - in a final outward expansion - the night-time space of the stars.

In this carefully ordered place of visual experience, there are two processes that gradually but inevitably encounter and affect one another: the living, unfixed motion of human visual perception. For a moment they meet at the juncture of artistically designed, geometric forms, only to pull away from each other once more to reach beyond this fixity. In the process, the boundaries of the work itself are annulled. When we see the sculpture, its modest yet emphatic transparency leads beyond it to that which surrounds and - in the interchange of interior and interior - fills it. The boundaries we customarily use to define both nature and art disappear; our traditional mode of thinking in boundaries - with the corresponding distinction between "interior" and "exterior" in traditional sculpture - becomes an osmotic, permeating, opening apprehension: nature as movement, art as a membrane for contacts, light as a transitory process, and time and space as an earthly, sensual experience and at the same time a sublime perpetuity and vastness, transcending our senses.

Maria Nordman’s early tree-sculptures from 1977-78 on were already marked by this interactive relation between art and the surrounding space (which is also "interior" space) and between art and viewer. These works explored the transparency of inside and outside through the osmotic separation and connection of two equivalent yet different parts. The plan for Coulter Pine/California Fan Palm Park of 1977-78 calls for two quadratic spaces surrounded by pines and palms with a boundary/juncture common to both areas. The plan¹ emphasizes the permeable nature of these "boundaries": "The right of passage / from every direction / through the walls of trees // On public land / surrounded by parklands or streets / a leveled ground / covered with grass / light and sound // specifications / - contains no objects to the edge of the grass / - between the trees is a distance of 20' / - grass continues to 20' outside the perimeter of trees / - selective watering for a similar growth rate of trees." The plan is inscribed "Public Square"; the decisive plastic element of this tree-sculpture is its "open walls" - open for light, sound, air, animals, and people.

Since 1969, Maria Nordman has been realizing sculptures in public space: not only does she exhibit objects, she opens the body of these sculptures to the encounter with the chance passer-by. At first they were rented spaces outside the official context of art (museum or gallery), spaces with transparent walls, for example the early Workroom² with two-way mirror glass: from the outside, passers-by see the image of their own exterior space; from the interior, within the boundary of the space, they watch the "film" of the happenings outside. Shortly thereafter the artist began creating "boundaries" that were even more permeable, for example through a precise demarcation in lighting that served to create two spaces within a single darkened, and once again rented, space (4th and Howard, San Francisco 1973; repeated in Varese, Collection of Panza di Biumo). In this darkness, all that is visible is a "boundary" of light.

Maria Nordman’s tree-"sculptures" belong in the same category as these variously defined interrelationships of transparent and traversable areas, bodies, and spaces. The plan for a park Linden Tree and Nordman Pine Park shows a more marked contrast between two quadratic tree-"bodies": an open square of lawn, irregularly "filled" with individual linden trees, and a quadratic "clearing" enclosed by a thickly growing row of pines, accessible through four "entrances" (1982).³ In 1978 she executed Ground Owl/Ground Squirrel Park in Bakersfield, across from California State College.⁴ The oval ring of an unpaved footpath about six meters wide is encompassed by a double row of sequoia trees. The inner area of the oval remains as uncultivated and available to the local flora and fauna as the surrounding area.⁵ A second, quadratic footpath of packed local soil, surrounded by Ginkgo trees, itself surrounds a cultivated lawn extending on the outside to an area of 30 x 30 m. Here it is not only art and nature that are interrelated in a differentiated way, but also the gradations of "cultivated" and "uncultivated" nature - gradations which in turn connect up with the further gradation of nature formed by art. Here, everything - every level of the formed as well as the unformed - is contained in everything: the boundaries of "art" have been dissolved.

1 Maria Nordman: De Sculptura. Works in the City, Munich 1986, p. 88, figs. 42, 43.

2 Maria Nordman: De Musica. New Conjunct City Proposals, Münster/Lucerne/New York/Hamburg 1993, p 32.

3 Maria Nordman: De Sculptura, p. 88, figs. 47a, 47b.

4 Ibid., p. 85.

5 Characteristic of Maria Nordman’s work is the difference between this sculptural and real permeability and the sanctuarium created 18 years later in Münster by herman de vries, a work which is comparable to Nordman’s in its openness to the chance arrival of flora and fauna and even in the oval form of its "boundary".