A new biodiversity-inspired sculpture by British sculptor Laura Ellen Bacon has recently been installed on the University of Warwick campus. The artwork, titled Don’t Let Go, took almost a month to be assembled on site by weaving and knotting willow around a tree situated along Warwick Arts Centre’s Follow that Hare: Art and Nature Trail. The sculpture is intended to provide, within its grooves and crevices, a habitat for insect life on campus.

Insects are crucial to the biodiversity of terrestrial ecosystems, playing a number of roles – from degrading or consuming leaves, wood, carrion and dung to dispersing fungi and providing an important food source for other animals. In the artist's own words, Don't Let Go is intended to resemble a ‘colony’ of life forms clinging to, pouring from and multiplying on the tree. The sculpture's intentionally abstract form allows it to be interpreted as either supportive, similarly to a tree’s own root structure; or as parasitic, such as a climbing vine or fungus. As a whole, the artwork's separate yet inter-connected pieces provide a visual representation of the complexity of an ecosystem. Interestingly, the sculpture will in time degrade and decompose as insects begin to live in it; however, this is precisely the artist's point as the object represents the symbiotic link between destruction and decay, on the one hand, and nutrition and procreation, on the other.

Read more about the sculpture and Laura Ellen Bacon here.

Visit our Outdoors pages to find out more about the incredible biodiversity present on campus.