Maquette (Design for Tree No. 1 for the Jadindagadendar)

In 2004, Charles Avery embarked on a lifelong endeavor. The Islanders is a vast multimedia project that describes in meticulous detail the flora, fauna, inhabitants, lives and customs of a fictional island, partly inspired by Avery’s own upbringing on the Isle of Mull in the 1970s. ‘The fiction has been strongly influenced by Mull,’ he says; ‘Now fiction is reinforming reality’ (C. Avery, quoted in J. Wullschlager, ‘Charles Avery on Show in Edinburgh,’ Financial Times, 17 July 2015). Jadindagadendar is a municipal park in the island’s capital Onomatopoeia. Filled with artificial plants and animals rather than living botanical specimens, it represents, according to the artist, the Islanders’ rejection of nature: the sculptural installations we see are souvenirs brought to our world from this strange place by a traveler called Hunter. Maquette (Design for Tree No. 1 for the Jadindagadendar), a five-metre high bronze sculpture from this series, strung with alien fruit and inspired by mathematical formulae, was installed on public commission in Edinburgh Waverley Station last year – appropriately the only rail station in the UK with a fictional moniker, named after Walter Scott’s 19th century series of novels. The present work is an elegant maquette for Tree no. 1, a full-size version of which was shown alongside other flora at Amsterdam’s Grimm Gallery in 2012.