Bowls

A tree never loses a wound: 
its growth is always additive, encapsulating, hiding, recovering, but never forgetting. Knowing where the tree used to live brings home the fact that wood is not merely a fungible commodity but an organism unique unto itself.

The tree was once home to social organisms: termites, fungi, birds and mammals. Because the lives of individuals and societies are by their very nature complex and chaotic, simple classical forms allow the tree to speak with clarity. 

Because my work is subtractive, revealing what was already present in the tree, it necessarily becomes contemplative. Before I make the first cut into a fresh tree trunk, I peel back the layers of annual rings in my mind, like a virtual onion.

As material is removed, surprises expose themselves: colors, branch buds, old traumas. Like the tree, which also has no say in such matters, I work with it. Using diseased, infested wood adds another layer of growth: colony nests take forms reminiscent of old cave dwellings and underground rivers, weaving their way through what was once living tissue, creating challenges for making hollow vessels, already fragile in conception.

Realizing the decay of a mountain is the growth of a riverbed, we see in every death the mirror of new life. I am repeatedly drawn into the stories they tell.