A 140-Year-Old Hemlock Was Lost. Now It Has New Life as Art.

The sculptor Jean Shin gravitates to castoff objects, including a threatened tree at Olana, the former estate of Frederic Church.

GREENPORT, N.Y. — Earlier this year, an ailing 140-year-old hemlock tree died at Olana State Historic Site, the idyllic former estate of Frederic Edwin Church, a leading figure of the 19th-century Hudson River School. It was a significant loss, for reasons ecological, aesthetic and sentimental. Having stood sentinel on the lawn right outside Church’s fabled Persian-inspired villa, the hemlock was a living artifact of his artistic ambition, as well as his lesser-known proto-conservationist efforts, and was planted at a time when his attention had turned from painting detailed landscapes to designing them. But as one chapter in the tree’s distinguished life ended, a vital new one began in the hands of a contemporary artist, Jean Shin, who is known for her large-scale installations made from society’s discards. Shin spent the early spring working on the green lawn of Church’s house-museum, where she transformed the once-majestic conifer into a site-specific sculpture. The muscular 40-foot trunk now lies atop two small boulders and has been meticulously fit with a patchwork of leather in shades of lemon yellow and sky blue. Shin arranged its bark in delicate piles beneath it, as though the specimen had shed its shell and undergone a magnificent metamorphosis. Titled “Fallen,” the work might call to mind a body being prepared for burial, and not only because our perceptions have been colored by a year of grief and loss. “It’s a custom-made shroud, to honor and protect it,” Shin said, as she inspected one of the hemlock’s thin leather-clad limbs — a test run in her studio, which occupies a renovated barn southwest of Olana. “It’s a bit like an open casket. I want people to see the tree up close, to feel it and remember it. We’ve all been missing that tactility this past year.”