Inside Art

Slumber Underground: Interspecies Burrow is a scaled-up model of a groundhog burrow people can crawl inside to encourage empathy with nature. I studied existing burrows with Ground Penetrating Radar and Arthroscopic cameras, then wove my interpretation out of rattan and found materials. Next, I took soil samples that Rachel Field, a Ph.D. candidate in Biomedical Engineering, analyzed in her lab at Columbia University. Finally, I lined the inside of my burrow with felt sculptures of the bacteria. Children created games and tossed the bacteria sculptures around during the opening.

New York Times

“Much of the work was commissioned, but one piece came almost unaltered from its appearance at an art center in Baltimore. That installation, Julie Ann Nagle’s “Slumber Underground: Interspecies Burrow,” is based on scans of a groundhog’s tunnels. Made of bird and wasp nests, rattan and other materials, the crawl-in burrow contains small felt sculptures of soil bacteria.

’I wanted to make a piece about empathy with nature,’ said Ms. Nagle, whose installation includes a video of the groundhog’s habitat. (You even glimpse the furry critter.)”

Laurel Graeber, February 12th, 2020