Does this mean she is crossing the line from artist to advocate?
Lin paused for a thoughtful moment. As a child, the burning of toxic contaminants on Lake Erie did spur her to environmental activism. She petitioned the Kroger Co., owner of Ralphs and Food4Less, to ban animal traps and advocated for Greenpeace.
"I've always said I present history. I don't dictate what people think," she began carefully. "I don't try to preach. This one, like the others, makes you aware of it: 'Did you know the sound of the songbirds, as we knew it when we were little, are gone?' " "But yeah," she added with a shrug, "Definitely, I will be giving groups and people things they can do in their everyday lives."
Lin would like to use donated electronic billboards in urban meccas, flashing messages when a plant or animal becomes extinct -- a loss that occurs every 20 minutes. She envisions interactive table monitors where people can educate themselves.
She put down her hammer and chisel and rose from the floor, heading for her prototype book. She flipped through pages with harshly vivid photographs: lifeless reefs, tree stumps of clear-cut forest, melting glaciers. She pointed to a photo of a turtle -- painfully deformed as he grew around a plastic ring that squeezed a grotesque waistband into his shell -- and grimaced.
"I grew up surrounded by land, and it had a huge impact on me," she said. "We forget to look out and see how incredibly beautiful the world is. We forget that."
Focus on land and sea
Land, and the shape of the world, is the theme of her San Diego show, which moved on from St. Louis' Contemporary Art Museum. The exhibit is an indoor installation of the kind of environmental sculptures that reveal the curves of the Earth and the kinetic waves of the sea.
As Lin toured it, she walked gingerly in brown suede clogs, across the uneven cobble of her sensual 10-foot hill, "2 x 4 Landscape," composed of thousands of wood blocks that seem to move with the shifting light. Alongside a wall and in crates outside sat pieces of her "Blue Lake Pass," modeled after a range where she hikes with her husband, Daniel Wolf, near the Colorado summer home they share with their two young daughters.
"I don't consider myself any different than 19th century landscape painters," she said earnestly. "It's just that now we can perceive the shape of the world scientifically. These are like pixilated landscapes."
