Marc Quinn

Held by Desire (Square Root) belongs to a series of sculptures by artist Marc Quinn which recreates the bonsai tree, the age-old emblem of contemplation. On a visit to London’s Chelsea Flower Show in 2013, the artist purchased the gold medal-winning bonsai tree from the event and thereafter embarked on a series of works taking this tree and others as his subject.

A bonsai tree is one which has had its roots pruned and whose size is controlled through prescriptive living conditions. It is therefore a tree which has been subjugated to human interference, suspended in time and which conform to a pre-ordained ideal of its appearance: literally held by our desire. Marc Quinn has long been fascinated with human endeavour to attain beauty and control the course of nature. He probes its limitations and searches for the point at which something organic has suffered such aggressive scrutiny that its identity becomes abstract.

Quinn used 3D technology to reproduce an exact replica of the original trees, varying only its size. In concordance with the concept of a bonsai tree, Quinn’s metal trees embody the art of freezing something at a certain time in its natural growth cycle. Held by Desire (Square Root), a monumental full-scale sculpture, ironically delivers the tree to its natural enlarged form. The artist comments that this in one way is a statement of control slackening and nature succeeding; however, nature’s success is illusory, being achieved here in a controlled manner, under Quinn’s own directing hand, therefore again failing to evade fully the grasp of human interference.