The Cauldron
Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York, 1996
The summer of 1995 saw Long Island's most devastating forest fire in Westhampton, which consumed 40,000 acres of the pine barrens. For The Cauldron, Lipski put two of the blackened, charred trees base-to-base, creating a single root ball, swaddled in cotton and suspended over a cauldron created from casts of The Elgin Marbles in the museum's collection. Using machines borrowed from various manufacturers in the chemical processing industry, liquids were pumped into the root-ball, oil was skimmed, ice created and re-melted, columns of liquid bled from pipes, and pulsated around the room. The New Yorker referred to it as, "art imitates life-support."
