A tisket, a tasket, an information graphic

Basket weaving produces playful representations of environmental data

January 21, 2011|Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent

BROCKTON — There aren’t many installations that would fit as perfectly at the Museum of Science as they would at the Fuller Craft Museum. Nathalie Miebach’s “Changing Waters’’ is one. It’s a breathtaking evocation of layers upon layers of environmental data from the Gulf of Maine, our own stretch of the Atlantic Ocean reaching from Cape Cod up to Nova Scotia. It’s at the Fuller, not the Museum of Science, because Miebach charts her data on a three-dimensional graph she creates, at least in part, through basket weaving.

“Changing Waters’’ is the most engrossing, playful, and ambitious information graphic I have ever seen. Miebach has been showing her data-filled, colorful, pinwheeling basket sculptures for some time — one is on view elsewhere in the museum, as part of “The New Materiality: Digital Dialogues at the Boundaries of Contemporary Craft,’’ up through Feb. 6. “Changing Waters’’ outstrips anything she’s done before, and not only in terms of scale.

The installation consists of four columnar sculptures hanging from the ceiling and tethered to the floor, and a bird’s-eye view of the Gulf of Maine, which fills an entire gallery wall. The sculptures are typical Miebach works, bright and bristling with knobs and rods and flags, each denoting some scrap of information. With the wall piece, the artist takes a new, ambitious tack, one that cross-pollinates maps, sculpture, and landscape. She also employs an impressive array of techniques beyond basket weaving, including origami and painting.

There’s a legend so viewers can see what Miebach is charting. Fish are woven paper mats: blue for hake, brown for cod, blue and brown for haddock. Red balls mark air temperature. Storms are bull’s-eye formations. Origami whales denote whale migration. And more.

Miebach gathered her data from buoys and on-shore weather stations of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, and the Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System. The density of information makes it as much a material as Miebach’s reeds, ropes, dowels, and paper. There’s a cumulative effect, a point at which all the bits and bobs coalesce into an organic whole, a portrait of the Gulf of Maine.