As of April 22, 2024, the installation of the work Perch, created by Jean Shin, and curated by Jessica Hong, opened at Appleton Farms in Ipswich (nonprofit company The Trustees of Reservations). The exhibit has since closed to make way for other installations; however, its legacy still carries a meaningful message about art and the environment that surrounds it. This work is part of the Trustees of Reservations’ Art and Landscape Initiative, a site-specific multi-year project in Massachusetts showcasing work by several contemporary artists. The work is entirely built for the space in which it is displayed. Artists who have previously had their work on display include Hugh Hayden, Rose B. Simpson, Jeppe Hein, Sam Durant, Alicja Kwade and Doug Aitken. Current exhibits on display with The Trustees include “Across Boundaries Across Barriers” by Fruitlands Museum, “Place of Intersection” by Fruitlands Museum, and “Self-Portraits” by Zohra Opoku at deCordora Sculpture Park and Museum.
Jean Shin’s Perch is an installation several years in the making and encompasses 18 sculptures across the field at Appleton Farms. The pieces are composed of repurposed wooden fence rails and copper plates recovered from roof renovations in August of 2023 at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts.
The Trustees initially approached Jessica Hong in 2020 for the Art and Landscape program, after which she quickly looped in Jean Shin. The two had been, to use Hong’s words, “in dialogue” since their first meeting in 2019 at the Asia Art Archive’s Leadership group. It wasn’t until some time later that they were able to visit the Appleton Farms space in person, having started the process at the height of the pandemic. “As we continued our research and development process, travel opened up allowing us to visit these sites,” Hong told the Trustees in the interview.
During their visit, Shin and Hong learned that staff and volunteers had been keeping track of birds in the hayfield: specifically, a migrating songbird called the Bobolink that had settled on the Farms’ grounds. Bobolinks travel approximately 20,000 kilometres to and from South America every year, are common in grasslands, and are steadily declining in numbers, having declined 1.5% per year between 1966 and 2019. Through conversations with agriculturalists and ecologists, Shin and Hong developed a great appreciation for the passion surrounding the Bobolink. The sculptures not only serve as a place for the birds to rest, but also to perform courtship rituals and to ensure the safety of their nests. The perches offer a place for male birds to exhibit acrobatic courtship, as well as protecting the birds and their nests from farmers while the Bobolinks mate. In creating art that places environmental preservation and harmony at the heart of its intention, Jean Shin’s Perch embodies the UN Sustainable Development Goal of Climate Action.
Shin’s work has long dealt with repurposed materials and environmental justice. On her personal website, she has several categories of work listed, for installation pieces, public projects (which include Perch), sculpture art, and works on paper, as well as prints & editions. Throughout her works, the intent and inspiration behind a piece fit the material it is made from and often its exhibition space. The results are striking and force us to imagine regularly discarded materials in new contexts, with new purpose and new life. Some categories of her work include plastic pollution, e-waste & technology, unseen labour, consumerism, and site-specific interventions.
Shin’s work, both with Perch and previous exhibits is not new, but draws on the modern practice of eco-art (also commonly known by other names such as in situ art). In the words of Dominic Witek for Artsper magazine, it is created in the legacy of art and nature continuously finding ways “to intersect with one another.” A movement acknowledged to have formally begun in the US in 1969-1970 (although similar styles of integrating nature and art may have pre-existed in situ), in situ began as artists wanted to delve beyond traditional spaces for their art to be displayed.
Jean Shin has worked with The Trustees’ Appleton Farms’ space to create with in situ art a work that is functional for preservation and ecological action, as much as it functions as a work of art to be observed. Following Shin’s history of creating sculpture and installation pieces with statements about consumption and the environment it impacts, she takes a step further, creating with her art not only a message but a contribution to ecological health.