Mika Taga ’22 wears earth tones—a lot of brown and green—so often that a friend once jokingly asked her why she was always “dressing like a tree.” For anyone familiar with Taga’s work, this makes perfect sense. A visual artist who specializes in sculpture made from natural materials, Taga is always, in a way, channeling her inner tree.
In July, Taga returned to campus at the invitation of Anne Beckley, Wellesley’s senior outdoor gardens horticulturist, to create a collaborative, ecological, ever-changing installation in the Wellesley College Botanic Gardens. The result is The Nest, a site-specific woven sculpture encompassing a northeast corner of the gardens bordering Route 135. Under Taga’s guidance, Botanic Gardens staff, Wellesley students interning at the gardens this summer, and enthusiastic children from the Wellesley Community Children’s Center (WCCC) helped construct the piece.
“I’m excited about a sculpture that feels alive,” Taga recently told Destiny Palmer, a local artist who currently has work installed in the Botanic Gardens. Their conversation was part of the gardens’ summer Friday lecture series. Taga shared that as a student she changed her major from chemistry to religion to architecture to studio art, and she took a two-year leave of absence to live in a Buddhist community in California. Taga began gardening there, “working with my hands to quiet my mind,” she said. When she returned to Wellesley in summer 2020, she interned with Beckley in the Botanic Gardens—the only student working there at the time, because of the pandemic. She and Beckley developed a close bond. “Working with you changed my life,” Taga told Beckley during the Botanic Gardens presentation.
Beckley had previously invited Taga to return to campus in April to create an ephemeral sculpture made from slices of branches from an oak tree in the Botanic Gardens that had to be taken down. When the opportunity to do another installation arose, Beckley called Taga again.
“We really didn’t have a plan, we just had sticks,” Taga said, laughing. In anticipation of the artist’s return, Beckley and her team spent the early summer pruning branches in the space that would become The Nest, piling up brush and clippings for Taga to use. Beckley and Connor Schmitz, Wellesley’s collections horticulturist, came up with the idea of building a “dead hedge”—a natural fence made out of branches. Taga came in to shape the space, but, as she said, the sculpture “is emergent, arising through many different interactions, conversations, and hands. It developed naturally, like an evolutionary process, collectively. A living, social sculpture.”
The result is a woven 90-foot curving wall that looks kind of like a fort. “The spaces and shapes that I’m most excited about are reminiscent of places from childhood,” said Taga, who noted that as a child, she loved climbing in and around a large redwood stump at her grandmother’s house in northern California. “I want to be shaping places for children to be in.”
When Taga first started making art, she had perfectionist tendencies, but now, she said, she has allowed her art to become “more porous” and imperfect. She described her current practice as “joyful and collaborative.” Taga loves working with young children in particular; she spent time as a Montessori teacher to 1 ½- to 3-year-olds.
Beckley, whose younger daughter is in one of the WCCC’s preschool classrooms, thought it seemed natural to invite the children from the WCCC as collaborators in building The Nest. Taga loved their enthusiasm and artistic instincts—they charged right into weaving and stacking branches. “The kids immediately know what to do,” said Taga.
“The space is so versatile, it’s going to be different things to different people,” said Beckley. She hopes to find not just the WCCC kids playing in The Nest but also perhaps an English class discussing poetry or a staff member taking a minute to meditate in the middle of a busy workday. Taga said she would like the Wellesley community to feel inspired to add to The Nest, continuing to shape it, and for the space to be maintained by the people who use it.
“You’re part of the natural world,” said Taga, “but you can also have a hand in changing it.”
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Mika Taga will return for a “Nesting with Nature” Garden Destination Walk with Beckley on Thursday, November 12 at 1:30 p.m.
Check out this senior snapshot video from 2022 to see how Taga’s art has evolved!