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Mark Dion’s “Tree of Life” is the first permanent artwork developed for the public art project “Art on the Meuse”. The American artist created a tree sculpture featuring animals and objects that refer to the surrounding landscape in Herbricht. His tree of life is like a journey through the past, present and future of the Meuse Valley. The creative power of nature is the central theme.

A symbolic tree for a symbolic place

The artwork is as symbolic as its location. Residents are moving out of Herbricht, a small village in Lanaken, and no one else is taking their place. While the village is dying out, the majestic Meuse river remains. On a small hill near the water, galloway cattle and konik horses seek refuge at high tide. “That image of the river receding after a flood was a great source of inspiration for me. After the flood, the trees were still standing, full of grasses, plastics and strange objects,” Mark Dion explains. “It made me reflect on the landscape over time. The river has been flowing here for thousands of years and will keep on flowing for thousands of years after us. Time flows through a landscape like water flows through a river.”

The circle of life 

On this hill on the banks of the Meuse stands a tree of life six metres high. Konik horses and Galloway cattle gather here at this refuge during high water. The Meuse was once a sea. Then an ice plain and now we know it as a rain river. That circle of life is reflected in this tree. You see sixteen objects and animals hanging, all related to the ecology, mythology or history of this place. Each of them tells a story. With the Mosasaurus or mesh lizard you travel 75 million years back in time, with the woolly mammoth to 10,000 B.C. The Meuse Valley is now home to animals and insects such as the earthworm, the beaver, the green frog, the blue heron and the stag beetle. The buck with the silver chalice refers to the eighteenth-century legend of the Buckriders, a local gang of robbers.