Watch: Artist Douglas Coupland has been commissioned to create a golden version of the 800-year-old hollow tree that was Vancouver’s first tourist attraction. Tanya Beja reports.
Vancouver residents and visitors travelling around the area of Marine Drive and Cambie next year will see a mirror-image replica of a historic Stanley Park tree.
Canadian artist Douglas Coupland has been commissioned to build a public art piece and he chose the iconic Hollow Tree in Stanley Park.
Coupland said the Hollow Tree in Stanley Park holds a lot of memories for him and he remembers it from his youth.
Whenever we drove out-of-town visitors past the tree, we always said, “Why, it’s big enough to hold a car!” Coupland said in a statement. “In the 20th century, placing a car inside a tree didn’t feel like an ecological tragedy—instead it seemed merely kind of cool—and in many of the old black and white photos you see of it, there’s usually a Model A parked inside stuffed with bored men with walrus moustaches and equally bored women wearing cameo brooches on their tightly pulled collars.”
The Hollow Tree is said to be about 800 years old and was Vancouver’s first major tourist attraction. It was badly damaged by a windstorm in December 2006, and was slated for removal due to possible safety hazards. However, public outcry and a fundraising campaign managed to save the tree.
Coupland’s tree will be the centrepiece of the front corner plaza at the entrance to Intracorp’s new MC2 development at Marine Drive at Cambie.
“Vancouver is changing, too. I barely recognize the Vancouver of my youth,” said Coupland in his statement. “While most cities on earth never change, Vancouver seems to morph through a new version of itself every ten years. It’s pretty obvious the centre of the city’s gravity is moving eastward, and that the demographic reality of Vancouver is changing by the hour. What do all these new Vancouverites make of their new home? Vancouver is a city with so little history compared to most other cities… does it feel like a blank piece of paper to newcomers? Maybe it does, and that’s one of the city’s attractions—the feeling that it’s a place where one can start over, or perhaps reinvent oneself.”
Coupland’s tree will be completed in 2015 and will be a golden version of the original.
“Our old impulse when confronted with an oversize tree was to drive a car through it,”said Coupland in his statement. “Our new impulse is to revere it and to be reminded of how lucky we are to be blessed by nature every time we pass by on our feet, on our bikes, in our cars and buses, and in our Skytrain when we enter and exit ground that is ever so slightly more hallowed with the gesture of the golden tree.”
WATCH: Douglas Coupland on the Golden Tree project
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