With the opening of frieze Senior Editor Evan Moffitt
Evan Moffitt On 10 May, you will unveil
Ghost Forest in Madison Square Park in New York: a sculptural installation and monument to the world’s dying forests. How did you first become engaged with the issue of deforestation and how will the work approach the specific ecological concerns of New York?
Maya Lin My earth-based, site-specific outdoor works, such as the
Storm King Wavefield [2007–08] or the earth line drawing I recently installed at Princeton University [
The Princeton Line, 2018], are embedded in the earth and of a permanent nature. Installing something temporary in Madison Square Park at first threw me. I considered doing a piece with living trees that you could move through, akin to a willow walk. Then, while hiking in Colorado with my husband two summers ago, I saw swathes of forest that had been devastated by beetle infestation, because the winters hadn’t been cold enough to kill off the beetl