Field of Corn (with Osage Orange Trees)

Audio Transcription:

“I’m Malcolm Cochran, I’m an artist in Columbus. I’m a sculptor, and for the last 15 years or so a lot of my work has been public art, but I don’t consider myself a ‘public artist.’ I also do projects for gallery and museum viewing. You can see now, if you look at Field of Corn that there was only the row of trees there and nothing else, and the beginnings of business and office complexes around it. Honestly, at one point I thought, ‘Well, there’s nothing here to get my teeth into; there’s nothing. It’s a dead site.’ It’s this little island surrounded by stuff; it’s flat, it’s vacant. I really wondered what I could do there but I decided in my proposal to embrace what I saw, which is the end of an agricultural … not focus, but a concentration of agriculture in Dublin and the shift to a suburban city, and to make that the subject for the work. So it’s very much a response to the site. I remember the idea gelling when I was driving to Cincinnati. It must have been early in the summer, because the rows of corn weren’t tall enough yet to have grown together. So as you drive along, you can see down the lengths of the rows and the wonderful “thunk, thunk, thunk” of the rows as you drive by, and it was really that – plus thinking about the agricultural past of Dublin – that gave me the idea for the project.”

To learn more about Field of Corn (with Osage Orange Trees), visit dublinarts.org/publicart.