Most trees in the forest are older than their surrounding human residents. Artist Rob Mulholland wanted to capture this delicate relationship between people and nature with his reflective sculptures. Installed in the woods and around Scotland, the mirrored stainless steel pieces are permanent installations. Shaped in the human form, the mirrors reflect the settings around them, rural or urban, and the people that pass through.
"[The sculptures] are a faint trace of the past people and communities that once occupied and lived in this space," Mulholland says in a press release about "Vestige," his rural series. "The figures absorb their environment, reflecting in their surface the daily changes of life in the forest. They create a visual notion of non–space. A void as if they are at one moment part of our world and then as they fade into the forest they become an intangible outline."
Mulholland is an installation artist based out of Scotland. His mirrored sculpture series are one ton, life-sized cutouts of the human form, based on the artist himself or volunteers, he said in an email interview. Each piece's reflective surface is slightly warped, creating a marbled view of the world it depicts.
"In essence the figures stand passively absorbing and reflecting the people and day to day life of the town, capturing and momentarily recording the constant flow of daily life," he states on his website.
His art is a mix of personal and commissioned work, like in the case of his "Vestige" series commissioned by the David Marshall Visitors Centre in the lush green forest of Aberfoyle, Scotland.
"Initially the concept for Vestige was a specific response to the relatively recent historic changes that have occurred in this area of Scotland regarding the re-location of people and communities by government in order to exploit natural resources after the First World War," he wrote in an email interview. "This also resonates particularly in Scotland as many Highland communities were forced off the land in the early to mid 18th century to make way for large sheep farms. Vestige as an installation relates to these historical facts."
Click through below to view photographs of Rob Mulholland's mirrored sculptures:
