Contemporary Artists: Mark Dion

Part of the Contemporary Artists series.

Mark Dion is an American artist who metamorphoses into an ecologist, bio-chemist, detective and archaeologist. In his gallery installations around Europe and American since the 1980s, Dion has constructed the laboratories, experiments and museum caches of the great historical naturalists - following in their footsteps in his own adventurous, eco-inspired journeys to the tropics.

Dion crosses Darwin, Disney and Hitchcock in work ranging from hundreds of photographic "specimens" documenting all the insect life in a single metre of meadow, to the meticulous gathering and labelling of the rubbish tossed out over hundreds of years from a 16th century Italian castle. His research and magical collections are presented in installational still-lifes which combine taxidermic animals with lab equipment with artefacts, like walk-through "wunderkammers", life-sized cabinets of curiosity. The artist is creating a permanent garden in Britain in 1998, an orchard of fruits facing extinction planted in the form of a tree of life - a sculptural gene pool for the future.

Corrin surveys Dion's most significant works and his ongoing investigation into natural history's obsession with categorizing nature. Kwon talks to the artist about the interface between ecology and culture and the phenomenon of site-specific art; Bryson makes and iconographical analysis of 'The Library For The Birds Of Antwerp', an indoor sculpture which Mark Dion constructed for 18 live African finches in 1993. The book also features Dion's own provocative, witty and often lyrical writings on nature and his role as an artist engaged in environmental issues.

'Contemporary Artists' is a series of authoritative and highly illustrated studies of important artists of the late 20th century. Each title offers a comprehensive survey of individual artists' works. Different genres of art writing are contributed by an international spectrum of authors who are leading figures in their fields, ranging from art history and criticism to philosophy, cultural theory and fiction. Each study provides incisive analyses and multiple perspectives on contemporary art and its inspiration. These are essential source books for everyone concerned with art today.