I first saw the work of Mark Jenkins on a Discovery channel short feature[1] which shows both his street installations and his nature sculptures. Mark Jenkins is resident in Washington DC who uses clear packing tape[2] to create sculptures that he then installs on city streets or poses in natural settings (notably his hometown of Fairfax Va). He has said that visiting a Juan Muñoz exhibition in 2001 inspired him to start doing street installations using a casting technique that he came upon as a child and later developed while living in Rio de Janeiro.

I was teaching English in Rio de Janeiro and had a lot of downtime between classes. One afternoon I’d made a large tinfoil ball, just to have something to play catch with while lying on the sofa. I decided to make a second one out of tape, but there wasn’t enough left on the roll to do it. The trick I’d figured out as a kid popped back into my head, and I cast the tinfoil ball with the tape. I was impressed with the results and decided to do a coffee pot. A couple months later, I’d gone through several hundred rolls, casting everything in my flat, including myself. The walls were thin in my apartment building, and my neighbors weren’t too thrilled at the sounds of packing tape spinning off the roll all night and day. One annoyed neighbor threw mud at my clothes drying on the window ledge, but I couldn’t be stopped.
themorningnews

Jenkins’s street installations (the series is named Embed) remind me very strongly of Banksy‘s work in that because the pieces are life size figures in everyday situations they are at first invisible to passers-by and only register as art installations when you at the second glance actually see them. The surprise effect of finding an installed/embedded piece of art which appeared over night in your neighbourhood is what makes these installations valuable and fun[3].

I want my work to get urbanites to question the authenticity of their surroundings.

Another series, named the Storker Project, places clear tape babies on streets performing feats that they shouldn’t be able to. The Storker effect is more disturbing than the embedded pieces because the babies are clearly unnatural[4].

Babies are wonderful but also fragile, and installing the kids outdoors to fend for themselves like a fresh crop of cicadas hits an unsettling nerve with some people. [...]. Sometimes I install them in playful positions, while other times they’re scavenging or hanging on for life.
themorningnews

Part of what appeals to me about Jenkins’s work is that the pieces exist, but are not really there. They are either temporary, or partial or fantastic/unnatural or (most appealingly) transparent spectres. And when the sculptures are left transparent they are no longer human or animal, nor are they the cocoons or shells left by humans or animals. They seem to me to rather be nothing more than memories of or ideas about their subjects.

But without doubt it is Jenkins’s nature work that appeals to me most. This consists of two parts, transparent tape sculptures of man made items (and men) in natural settings and transparent animals in urban settings[5]. The sense of displacement that comes from seeing ducks float in curbside ponds is deeply melancholic. And these are the pieces that are the art of not being there[6].

We’ve redesigned our environment to surround ourselves with the artificial and in the process alienated ourselves from the natural environment and our own animal selves. We are more like the tape men then our ape men forefathers.
Belio

Mark Jenkins’s nature sculptures are things that are missing from their surroundings, sometimes their being missing is ok and other times I wish they were really there.