Nature Walk: Meg Webster’s Verdant Spiral Leads Us into the Thicket
At Paula Cooper, we can “experience ourselves as entangled creatures.”
Through July 24, 2026—“The sun wavers among the pine trees / let us forget those who are unaware,” writes Pablo Neruda in his “Sonata with some pine trees” (1958). The poem hits deeply for those who have visited Neruda’s home at Isla Negra, Chile, and been in the surrounding forest. I remember precisely that shifting sun and the scent of sap so strong that I briefly forgot I was a person—I was purely the experience of the smell on the wind.
That kind of awareness is fleeting and rare. One feels something like it in Meg Webster’s Thicket, 2026, a verdant sculptural installation at Paula Cooper. The scent of branches, leaves, and berries is embodied in the form of the work—a tall, wide spiral of knitted nature that draws you to its fragrant core. Once in the thicket, you may as easily lose your sense of self as I did among Neruda’s pines, becoming aware of something much greater than you might otherwise imagine.
As the lines between self and world blur, so do those between nature and culture. While a Richard Serra spiral may make you think about negative space as the hidden generator of sculpture, Webster’s spiral makes you realize that even Serra’s steel is an inheritance from the earth. We are all in the thicket of a planet that makes our very being possible—yet our main engine of response is to remain unaware. Perhaps the churning of the world necessitates this. But Webster reminds us that we can pause, in the brevity of a gallery visit, to experience ourselves as entangled creatures.
Abetting this experience is the fact that the work plainly admits its fabrication. Over repeated visits, I noticed that the sculpture is occasionally refreshed with new greenery. A close look through these herbs and branches reveals a loose inner structure of pillars supporting the twists of Webster’s curving hedge. Nor can one forget that this swath of vegetation rests not on the ground but rather on the second floor of a gallery in Chelsea, or that the birdsong filtering in does not herald the return of the area’s original forests. Nevertheless, once we leave the sculpture and descend to the street, we are pleasurably aware of the invisible spirals of nature that surround us even in the concrete jungle.
The selection of artworks that appear alongside Thicket dramatizes this tension between what we see and what could be seen. On the wall to the right, three small, seemingly empty rectangular frames made from mustard-yellow beeswax literalize the point. We tend to think of the frame as something that guides us to the subject. But here, the distinction collapses—the waxy material is both content and container. Bees build their homes, and so do humans. We all frame our existences. Webster’s work asks us to remember that the frame is thus also a portal—if we walk through, we can experience the fullness of the thicket. Neruda ends his poem with two injunctions: “let us make a profession of being earth-bound / let us touch the earth with our beings.” It is not easy to let ourselves do this. To be earthbound is to be marked for death and decay, to refuse our illusions of transcendence and everlasting life. But Webster lets us know that with the recognition of our expiration comes something greater than the illusion of escaping this mortal coil: the full wonder of experiencing ourselves as part of nature. We only need to follow our noses.