STORYTELLING IN 3-DIMENSIONS

20+ YEARS!

BOTANICAL GARDENS EXHIBITS

Betty Ford Alpine Gardens & Education Center

Interior Interactive Exhibit Gallery

Xplore Design worked with Wells Resources, to design from the ground-up, the exhibits for this beautiful new state-of-the-art education center in Vail, Colorado. The project took about 18 months to complete, including the initial planning and concept phase. The exhibits showcase the fascinating story of Alpine plants and ecology.

One of the goals of Botanical Gardens is to encourage the exploration of plants and their ecosystems and yet there are few world plants that can compete with the charismatic mega fauna of the animal kingdom (e.g., elephants, whales, tigers, elk). To showcase plants in a ‘big’ way (to showcase them as charismatic mini-flora) we helped counter the notion that plants are unworthy of consideration.

Xplore Design art directed all design, and managed the fabrication over 5 different sub-contractors. Mark Talbot/Xplore and Marcella Wells/Wells Resources) worked closely during all phases from planning to fabrication. Marcella developed a comprehensive interpretive plan including visitor studies, which Mark/Xplore helped to refine for presentation, and used as the means to obtain client buyoff as well as production and fabrication guidelines.

The overarching thematic concept was "Alpine Plants play a major but often unseen role in global ecology, and can be a major '1st indicator' of climate change".

'BIG' exhibit podium

We took a sampling of 5 common and important alpine plants and created scale models of them at 7x life size. Also included are scale models of 4 anatomically correct wild alpine bees, placed within the exhibit show pollinating flowers.

'Wild' bee models

With the help of sculpturist Melisse Riechmann and creative direction from Nennette Kuich, we fabricated 4 species of bee, High Country Bumble Bee, Yellow Head Bumble Bee, Forest
Bumble Bee and Western
Bumble Bee.

Exhibit Plan Detail

Interpretive/Design Plan: Floorplan and Detail for the Primary 'BIG' exhibit. THe space was designed to be semi-portable, to accommodate various types of events, including normal visitation, special lectures, and fundraising events.

Concept Renderings

Concept sketches for two of the primary exhibit sections, 'BIG' and 'MAP'.

Greenhouse Mural

Early Sketches and final product, art directed by Mark Talbot/Xplore and Painted my Mickey Schilling of Mad Mick Studios. The scene depicts both flora and fauna of the alpine region.

Sex in the Garden

This panel highlights the various pollination methods and physical parts that alpine plants use to reproduce. Exhibit includes a 3D tactile brass sculpture of a pollen grain.

Alpine Regions of the Wrold

A variety of alpine regions exist in the world, including some surprising places, like the Scottish Highlands. Map includes 4 raised relief topographical maps from the alpine region there in Vail, Patagonia, the Scottish Highlands, and the Himalayas.

Survival of the Fittest

This exhibit describes the various and amazing evolutionary adaptations many alpine plants have to survive in the harsh alpine environs. Included in this is the 'Alpine Spring Beauty' whose diminutive surface structure is belied by an enormous and thick root system that can grow several feet underground - depicted here life size with a bronze tactile 3D sculpture.

BIG plants exhibit

Alpine plants are typically very small. So much so that when hiking the alpine terrain, most people take no notice of them. With the BIG exhibit, we scaled the plants to 7X of their original size, placing many of them over the visitor's heads. Inserted into the exhibit was a half-dollar at that same scale, to give the visitor a sense of proportion. Surrounding the octagonal shaped podium are panels depicting some of the most beautiful and important of alpine flora.

Survival of the Fittest Exhibit

Wall-offset mural with brass-casted details of plant roots and microscopic stoma structures, depicting the extreme adaptations that most plants have evolved to survive in harsh alpine conditions.

'Stoma' Detail

Brass casting, art directed by Mark Talbot/Xplore Design, and sculpted by Diane Sullivan. Object is 300x enlargement of a leaf stoma, the regulatory structure that controls water evaporation and absorption on the leaf surface.

MAP Exhibit

Mark Talbot installs the raised-relief maps that were a sub-part of the overall MAP exhibit that showed alpine regions around the globe. The 4 different maps demonstrate that not all alpine regions are in the mountains - in fact, there are some alpine regions that are actually near sea-level!

Intro Sign

Mark hanging the final sign for the exhibit intro area!

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