Enter a world of blue, where sculptures function as art and habitat. 
© Jason deCaires Taylor

Experience the Creative Partnership of Artist and Ocean

Under the blue line of the ocean’s surface is a world alive with movement. The environment is itself in constant motion; sunlight ripples across the scales of fish, while coral reef plants sway with the push and pull of the currents.

Often this world is forgotten by us land-dwellers, but not by sculptor and naturalist Jason deCaires Taylor. He has created, in the world’s first underwater museums, the perfect exhibit space for his larger-than-life sculptures.

His are museums that need no curator. The ocean does that job, constantly updating the exhibit and transforming the sculptures into a functioning artificial reef. Perhaps it is this partnership between artist and ocean that is the true innovation.

The ocean is an extraordinary exhibition space, altering art with life.
© Jason deClaires Taylor

An Eye for New Terrain, A Voice for the Ocean’s Future

What makes a great art exhibit? Emotive lighting, hints of wonder, astonishment, awe, or a powerful backdrop? Taylor’s chosen space has them all.

Taylor constructed underwater museums first near Grenada and then off the coast of Cancún, Mexico, and the Bahamas. Later he moved to more underwater locations around the world from Indonesia to the Oslo Fjord in Norway.  Taylor explains why he loves to work in the aquatic gallery space: 

Being underwater is a deeply personal, liberating, and otherworld experience. Like many interactions with the natural world, submersion is both humbling and life-affirming.

Reclamation, accentuated by dramatic lighting, purple Gorgonian sea fans, and a blue backdrop, reclaims the ocean as a precious place. 
© Jason deClaires Taylor

Through his passion for diving, Taylor acquired an understanding of the sea’s territory, seeing it as a place to be revered and respected. Travelers who visit his museums sense, through his art installations, this feeling of deep respect for the oceans.

The sculptures, themselves, give voice to messages about the environment.

Vicissitudes, off the coast of Grenada, symbolizes the cycle of life and how we
are all affected by the circumstance of our surroundings.
© Jason deCaires Taylor

The Bankers, submerged near Cancún, communicates denial and resistance to environmental
crises caused by over-fishing, dredging, and careless tourism.
© Jason deCaires Taylor

Taylor’s underwater museums, however, are more than a message. They show that humans can, in turn, have a positive impact on nature.

Art that Takes Action

Although coral reefs inhabit only 1% of the ocean’s vastness, a quarter to a third of all marine species call them home. Coral reefs are fleeting and fragile, too. Coral and sea sponges can be swept away by a hurricane or a snorkeler’s careless hand. They are often over-visited and over-fished.

With this in mind, Taylor constructs his sculptures in a way that preserves and extends coral reefs.

Taylor’s “Oh, I See” Moment: Gardening is not just for greenhouses.
© Jason deCaires Taylor

He uses durable ph-neutral cement to form his artwork, texturing surfaces so that reef plants can attach. This encourages the expansion of the natural landscape, and results in living spaces for crustaceans and fish.

His underwater museums, then, serve as artificial reefs that relieve natural reefs from excessive tourism in destinations like Cancún, Mexico. When snorkelers and divers spend time visiting Taylor’s sculptures, the natural reefs have space and time to generate life.

Taylor begins the rehabilitation process by planting coral in Man on Fire 
near Isla Mujeres, Mexico. 
© Jason deCaires Taylor

What started as “a small community” of sculptures off the coast of Cancún, grew into “an entire movement of people in defense of the sea.”

500 sculptures offer surfaces, nooks and crannies for marine life to develop. 
Art and preservation go hand in hand in Silent Evolution.
© Jason deCaires Taylor

Through his sculptures, Taylor has provided an amazing gallery of art and a place for ocean life to flourish. Ocean and artist share the same goals: encouragement of life. They have a symbiotic relationship, benefiting one another with their artistic innovations.

Silent Innovation by the Sea

Without as much as a whisper, the ocean begins to change the sculptures. As nature flourishes, the artwork undergoes mind-blowing transformations. Taylor explains witnessing the change:

As soon as we submerge the sculptures, they are not ours anymore. . . . The sculptures—they belong to the sea.  As new reefs form, a new world literally starts to evolve.

The ocean breathes life, color, and texture into Taylor’s work.
They become living sculptures.
© Jason deCaires Taylor

For Taylor, the innovation in his work really begins when nature takes over. The ocean paints with the most spectacular red algae, curving coral, and sponges.

What was once a cement casting of a local fisherman is now a
bizarre and beautiful sea creature.
© Jason deCaires Taylor

The transformation from studio to sea floor goes something like this:

A recognizable figure becomes a sculpture and is then abstracted by sponges and algae.
Nature leaves her mark near Isla Mujeres, Cancún, Mexico. 
© Jason deCaires Taylor

Jason deCaires Taylor’s work is a collaboration with the environment. Taylor lays down the foundation, and Nature forms positive mutations, achieving extraordinary appearances that only the ocean could conjure upon these man-made surfaces.

Oh, I See for Myself

I visited one of Taylor’s underwater museums off the coast of Cancún. As I swam from one sculpture to another, weaving around real reefs to visit the artificial ones, I saw first-hand how the sculptures change with time, how they become more a part of the sea with each passing day.

Floating above Reclamation
© Eva Boynton

I experienced the quiet underneath the ocean’s surface—a forgotten world that supports extraordinary life all the while.  I became a part of Taylor’s artwork and mission, a traveler who entered his underwater museum out of curiosity and who left with a sense of responsibility to encourage life in Earth’s vast blue oceans.

—§—

Thank you, Jason,  for your wonderful work and for sharing your photography. To see more images of Taylor’s work, check out his underwater sculptures. Dive deeper into Taylor’s underwater museum with this five minute video. 

Comment on this post below. 

At Toluca’s Cosmovitral—cultivating the cosmos and an entire botanical garden
© Dia Glez

A Botanical Garden Grows Under Glass

As I walked a stone path enveloped by plants from around the world, the light winked a blue-purple and then a red-orange. Plants dangled in the air. Behind supple foliage emerged hard lines of steel supports. Contrasting sounds hit me—bird song and human murmuring; water trickling and car engines rumbling.

What was this ethereal place of such contrasts?

I had stumbled into an unlikely oasis within the city of Toluca, Mexico. Here was both the largest art installation of stained glass in the world and a botanical garden with hundreds of plant species from around the world—the Cosmovitral.

Gardens the length of a football field under a sky of glass
© Eva Boynton

The name Cosmovitral comes from a combination of cosmos and vitral, the Spanish words for “cosmos” and “stained glass.” It is a place where a beautiful work of human design—the glass mural—meets a marvel of nature’s design—the botanical garden. For me, it was a traveler’s oasis.

Cosmic details of night and day in the ceiling panels at Toluca’s Cosmovitral.
© Eva Boynton

Venerable Roots and Worldwide Sprouts

At Cosmovitral, birds whiz from an African tree to the metal arches supporting the building that once was Toluca’s first grand market.

Built in art deco style, the original market building resembled a train station with clear glass above concrete walls. It opened in 1910 to celebrate the 100-year anniversary of the start of the Mexican Revolution and operated until 1975.

Thanks to Yolanda Sentíes, the first female mayor of Toluca, and artist Leopoldo Flores Valdés, the market building would have a creative new life.

Flores imagined the old glass walls of the market as a mural in stained-glass, with no beginning and no end. The city envisioned a botanical garden underneath. Five years later in 1980, the Cosmovitral opened. Today, more than 400 species from all over the world grow there.

Plants from many countries, such as
South Africa and Japan (bottom), grow side by side in Cosmovitral.
© Fanny Murguia (images 1-3) and Eva Boynton (image 4)

Harvesting Light

It took 45 tons of glass in 28 different colors to create the 71 stained glass panels in the Cosmovitral. Imported from Italy, Germany, France, Belgium, Japan, Canada and the USA, the glass lets light seep through walls and cast its colors on the gardens below.

Blue and purple reflections fall from a flying owl.
© Odette Barron Villegas

Leopoldo Flores and about 60 artisans created the windows across a 3-year period, using 25 tons of lead and about 500,000 pieces of glass. Blues are dominant on the north side with brighter colors on the south side.

Piece by piece, a masterpiece is made.
© Jennifer Doofershmirtz

The mural makes a statement on mankind’s connection to the universe. In the book El Estado de México, Gerardo Novo explains:

The theme depicted by the windows centers on universal dualities and antagonisms, the struggle between life and death, good and evil, day and night, and creation and destruction, all shown in cosmic continuum.

Light plays the essential role in illuminating the theme.  As the sun moves through the sky, different stained glass windows take prominence. Here humans plunge through swirling reds, oranges, and yellows, colliding headfirst with life and death.

Stained glass often relates to places of worship.
Perhaps Cosmovitral is just that—a place to pay honor to a cosmic connection.
© Eva Boynton

At one end of the building, light pierces a wall of glass, revealing the awe-inspiring Hombre Sol (Sun Man) that has become the symbol for Toluca. Here mankind is depicted in harmony with the universe.

With the alignment of the sun at the spring equinox,
Hombre Sol takes on a cosmic, fiery glow.
© Eva Boynton

Digging Deeper

With such light on the matter, Oh, I see the dualities in our universe.

I see how opposites—day and night, good and evil, life and death—have their own connection in the cosmos. I see the cycles of life. Even the plants growing at Cosmovitral are fed by nutrients of decaying organic matter with life and death ever present and ever important to the continuum.

The very dualisms represented in the vast murals are tightly connected, leaded together in fact, as they interact within the same universe.

Here, at my traveler’s oasis in the Cosmovitral botanical garden, I question if opposites are really opposing at all.

A final glance through the exit back into the garden and
a last reflection on the dualities of our universe
© Eva Boynton

Find info on visiting Cosmovitral and more photos here. 

Comment on this post below, or inspire insight with your own OIC Moment here.