In the middle of downtown San Francisco, a public Redwood Park emerges from among skyscrapers. The site epitomizes the city’s unique combination of nature and industry. It’s a great place for a pair of new exhibitions: Tara Donovan’s Stratagems and Lily Kwong’s Earthseed Dome, are the first installations to be commissioned by the ICA San Francisco in its new, nomadic model, headed by director Ali Gass. Gass always conceived of the Institute, which she founded in 2022, as nimble and oriented towards social justice; her new model, according to the museum, embraces Silicon Valley’s start-up spirit while bringing work directly to the public it serves.
Donovan is known for large-scale sculptures of accumulated, everyday objects. In 2024, she mounted Aggregations at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, CT, featuring tens of thousands of acrylic rods that altogether shone and bulged like the gemstones nearby. Her Stratagems is a series of torquing and towering sculptures made entirely of recycled CDs, that appear like translucent pillars in the lobby of downtown San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid Center.
Kwong began her career as a landscape designer and, in 2023, curated the New York Botanical Garden’s Orchid Show. In recent years, she’s ventured deeper into sculptural and photographic practices that keep the natural world at their heart. Her installation resides in the Transamerica Redwood Park, where she has fabricated Earthseed Dome from 3D-printed earth, seeded with native plants. Visitors can take their own seed packets from 20 pockets throughout the work. The program is a partnership with the Altadena Seed Library, founded by Nina Raj, which focuses on seed saving, stewardship, and repopulating local gardens in the wake of last year’s brutal fires.
The projects share an interest in data. Donovan’s sculptures contain digital information, rendered unusable in the CDs’ new aesthetic form, while Kwong is programming a robotic arm to print building blocks of her overall structure, and the seeds contain information that allows them to bloom. The two artists recently connected via Zoom—Donovan in her Brooklyn Navy Yard studio, and Kwong at home in the Bay Area—for a conversation about transcendence, motherhood, and the magic of the natural world.
Tara Donovan: We didn’t really have that much time to chat during install, did we? We were in different spaces, doing what we each needed to do. I made my sculptures in my studio, shipped them in crates, deinstalled them, arranged them, and worked on lighting. You’re making your work in public. That’s extremely courageous.
Lily Kwong: I’ve been on-site for weeks, printing earth every day. I’ve been watching your sculptures live and grow and really embody this space, t.hey Your sculptures feel like a species of trees, deeply connected to the ecology of the Redwood Park, though they’re made from these non-recyclable, obsolete elements.
TD: I wanted my sculptures to relate to the skyscraper architecture, which reminds me of a 1970s greenhouse. But their color and bark-like texture matches the trees. I’m always relying on the limitations of my material, yet my work ends up looking organic. Here, I’m basically working with a circle, the primordial symbol of unity.
LK: Nature has such a mathematical, organized logic. The pattern on the exterior of my sculpture comes from the radial design of Redwood seeds.
TD: I'd been to San Francisco, but I had never been to the Trans America Building until the site visit for this project. Before I got there and saw the redwoods, I didn’t really believe it or get it.
LK: Growing up, you did not go to the Transamerica Building. I went to a little art school in the Haight, and I was downtown all the time, and in the Mission, and that area was just for business. It felt closed off, energetically. Now it’s opened up with exhibitions and events for students and for SF Art Week. It’s a testament to SHVO and the development team.
TD: I read that the building was designed to bring more light to the park. I love that.
LK: I had a very surreal, inspirational meeting with your Bruce Museum sculpture. I saw it with my young son who circled the work with childlike wonder. My whole career, I’ve found people quite landscape blind. To get New Yorkers to notice orchids, I used 20,000 of them. I want people to see and feel something that’s gone unnoticed. Your work did that for me. The Bruce Museum has that amazing collection of gems and minerals, and your work echoes the geodes in a way that doesn’t feel like mimicry but like human genius. Where does a piece like that begin?
TD: All my work begins with the material. In that case, three different sizes of square acrylic rods. I wanted this straight, rigid material to capture the light and appear fiber optic. Basically, I made forks. I glued two shorter acrylic rods to either side of these larger rods. Imagine a “Y.” Then I could build outward. A steel armature holds it all together.
LK: How do you choose an object? Why a CD-ROM?
TD: The hardest part is figuring out my next material. I'm generally attracted to uniform, mass-manufactured things in the everyday world. I look for a peculiar trait that will activate something external when the material accumulates. The internet has made it harder. In the past, I’d wander Walmart or go to weird surplus places that don't exist anymore. They're online, and I need to touch things, hear them, buy small amounts and experiment.
For this project, I bought a bag of CDs at a thrift store, and they sat around for months. I’d forgotten that they’re reflective, transparent when you look through the edge. I started gluing them face to face, to get rid of the label, so they wouldn’t have a muddy cacophony of color. That became my single unit. I love a meditative process, and it became an exercise in stacking and figuring out different ways to stack, overlapping and gluing these pieces in different sculptural profiles, making sure they wouldn’t fall over. Right now, I’m trying to find my next material.
LK: I’d think the internet would make things easier.
TD: Everything is made in China. Often, I can only access mass manufacturers through WhatsApp. You can find earth and seeds, so you don't have that problem.
LK: We wanted to use native earth and soil, and that led to complications. We did a lot of our testing in Italy, where these machines are fabricated by a company called WASP. Then we moved to San Francisco and started sourcing mulch, clay, earth, and sandy loam, all from Northern California. It has different dry times, colors, textures. We had to rejigger our formulations.
TD: You’re using a robotic arm. Is its specific function to print Earth?
LK: No, the robotic arm can print all sorts of materials. But the machine that feeds the arm is specifically designed to print earth. WASP’s machines are more aligned with sustainability goals than many 3D printing outfits, who focus on plastics or concrete. We have two machines running. One prints a geomix of limestone and marble that’s more structural. Another, smaller machine prints the living, seeded soil mix.
I’ve been hesitant to work with technology. My mission has been to reconnect people to the natural world with tactile experiences. But I’m working in San Francisco during a tech revolution. I’m thinking about AI and robotics. I’m asking how humanity and the natural world can collaborate with these new technologies in a meaningful way that doesn't destroy the planet. And you don’t just write the program. It's this labor intensive, physical process. We're hand-mixing buckets of soil or geomix and feeding this machine that needs constant tending. You still can’t control weather or drying times. And seed germination depends on warmth and humidity. We’ve done a rigorous site analysis and sunshade studies, but how these seeds react to the environment is a bit out of our control. The unpredictability makes it exciting.
TD: Will you have to water it?
LK: We fabricated a built-in irrigation system. This piece is a seed dispersal hub. We're going to disperse 1000s of packets of seeds, all native. I love their ecological power and their metaphorical dimension. They embody hope, stewardship, and new life. We’re creating this ecological corridor in downtown San Francisco where people can touch the sculpture, dig their hands in, take these seeds, and disperse them in a backyard or highway median or neighborhood. The ecological footprint goes beyond the project.
TD: You've transitioned into making these more sculptural works in the last year or so.
LK: I had my first child in 2021 and my second in 2023. It’s a surreal, transcendent act, to grow and birth a child. It opened a creative portal for me. I thought: why not create a sculpture or a new body of work? I felt empowered by the instrument of my body. And I want to show my kids something cool and exciting that will make them proud. I became more daring and focused, because I have a fraction of the time. I’ve had this explosion of experimentation, between this more sculptural approach and my “lumens,” a body of photographic work I showed with Night Gallery, created in the wake of what was supposed to be my maternity leave with my daughter.
TD: A lot of my earlier work was assembled on site. After I had kids, I couldn’t crawl around on the floor in Germany for months. I've adapted how I make things so that they can get moved, and installation takes five days instead of 18.
LK: I read that you went to Catholic school in New York. My mom and aunts did too. I perceive a spiritual element in your work.
TD: I was raised in a very Irish Catholic house. Before my mother got married, she considered becoming a nun. As a teenager, I rejected Catholicism and explored other religions. I went to a Baptist church. I went down a rabbit hole of Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy. Since then, I’m just an atheist. But I believe in the spirit in objects. There is some numinous quality, a magic, that stems from being blown away by nature. Even something as simple as driving on the highway, past a cornfield, watching the rows ripple past. Or the fog.
LK: I also draw spiritual direction from the natural world, especially having grown up here. The redwoods have given me so much inspiration. To be able to create this work in a Redwood Grove is a blessing. I’m honored to create alongside these beings, these incredible trees.
