The Other Tree in Princess Park

From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History

To the Deep Cove residents who were so enraged by this chunk of steel. Thank you. We love our tree.

I was walking my dog in Princess Park last week and came across this fabulous tree sculpture hidden in the forest. According to a small plaque, “Mirare” has been here since last September and is a “sentinel at the forest’s edge, inviting us to venture into nature with respect and reverence.”

I love this stainless steel sculpture. It’s 17 feet high, cast from a fallen century-old Hemlock tree in Deep Cove and it changes with the weather.

I visited the artists in their Granville Island studio yesterday. Cheryl Hamilton has a background in animation, welding, glass blowing and art. Michael Vandermeer first trained as a nuclear physicist, but sculpture was more exciting. “It’s a lot of the same skills,” he says. “You’ve got to know chemistry and physics and all that stuff to make it work.”

The sculpture was intended to live in Deep Cove Park as part of the “Necklace Project.” Hamilton and Vandermeer won the competition with their design after spending a long time studying the area.

“The park is so beautiful, it feels like you are about to enter a magical world. We also experienced these trees getting cut down by the edge of the park and we thought why don’t we just cast one of those trees and put it back up,” says Hamilton. “The idea is that you see the houses on one side of the sculpture reflected in your finish, and you see nature on the other. And 20 years from now you would want to go back to that tree and still see nature on that one side of the signpost.”

Then things got interesting. In the two decades that Hamilton and Vandermeer have worked together they’ve never experienced anything like it—anger, hate mail, vitriolic messages left on their answering machine. A resident called their prototype a “bong” and said it would corrupt their children. When the artists drove up to the site in their truck people would stand at their doors and yell at them. A public meeting convened to explain the project was a disaster.

“We presented our concept and talked about the process. People stood up and said you are disgusting and there was so much anger,” says Hamilton. “It’s a tree! We were casting a tree.”

At that point it was obvious that the sculpture wasn’t going to work anywhere in Deep Cove.

“We didn’t want it to be in a community that was so full of anger, because it wasn’t about anger we wanted people to think about it,” says Hamilton. “It’s quite a moody sculpture. It changes with the environment so there’s a lot of subtle engendered moments in that art piece that was getting trampled by the hysteria.”

The budget for Mirare was $76,000 and the artists say they didn’t make a nickel. It weighs thousands of pounds, is made from the highest grade materials and it took nearly eight months to create. Hamilton spent three months inside the tube grinding and polishing to bring up its shiny finish. Vandermeer pulled apart a milling machine to make a special jig so they could drill the holes in the top, and Hamilton welded the pieces together to make it look like bark.

“We knew that piece of real estate was so important— important to us and important to the community and we wanted to make sure that whatever we made was worthy of the location,” says Hamilton. “Ironically it’s in a better location.”

Adds Vandermeer: “Princess Park is a beautiful park and it’s standing there and you can hear the birds chirping and the trees are rustling and the creek is babbling away in the background.”

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