Vancouver artist Douglas Coupland unveiled his concept for a new large-scale public art piece today. The new "Golden Tree" sculpture will be a mirror-image representation of the Hollow Tree in Stanley Park.
It is scheduled to be completed in 2015 and will become the centrepiece of the front corner plaza of a new development at Marine and Cambie.
The sculpture will be 13 metres tall. The company that commissioned it says it will be easily visible to Canada Line passengers as a landmark at Vancouver's southern gateway.
Coupland says he grew up with the Stanley Park Hollow tree and it holds many memories for him.
"Whenever we drove out-of-town visitors past the tree, we always said, 'Why, it’s big enough to hold a car,'" said Coupland.
"In the 20th century, placing a car inside a tree didn’t feel like an ecological tragedy. Instead it seemed merely kind of cool, and in many of the old black and white photos you see of it, there’s usually a Model A parked inside, stuffed with bored men with walrus moustaches, and equally bored women wearing cameo brooches on their tightly pulled collars."