the rhizotron
royal botanic gardens, kew

Engineered Arts' design for the Rhizotron passage way features a bronze sculpture made of 567 cast parts weighing over 1.2 tonnes, an illuminated floor mosaic with over 22,000 hand cut tiles and 40 wooden automata art works created with timber from the gardens. There are 8 video displays incorporated into the sculpture, which feature hand drawn animation created specifically for the installation.

The root sculpture in the Rhizotron fuses two aesthetics, natural and industrial to create the feel of a boiler room made of tree roots. Imagine the pipe work that services a large hotel, providing creature comforts for the guests - we could think of trees in the same way, they are the services providers for our planet, creating oxygen and controlling our climate, they make our planet habitable.

We wanted to populate this underworld with the denizens of the ground, those creatures that inhabit tree roots and live in the soil. Automata artist Matt Smith created animated wooden creatures, stage beetles, centipedes and worms to inhabit the porthole spaces within the sculpture. View video of insect automata in action.

Parts of the sculpture feature video screens displaying animations portraying the enormous variety of life in the soil. Rich, sinuous and stylish imagery were created by blending hand drawn and computer generated animation techniques.

Where the bronze sculpture meets the floor, it interfaces with an illuminated mosaic designed by Tracy Rasburn. The mosaic pattern is inspired by microscopic images of mycorrhiza, the symbiotic association between fungi and tree roots. The mosaic tiles were individually hand cut from translucent glass, and took three artisans over four months to apply.