I’ve spent what feels like a lot of time in my life thinking about the shapes of trees. I grew up in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, between the ancient old growth forests of the Cascades and the Coast Range.
In spite of this I don’t think of these sculptures as representations of trees, really, but more form that shares geometry with a tree. Maby this is a distinction like the character in the Borges story who tries to re-write Don Quixote, word for word, but without copying from the original, like searching for the algorithm that generated the original work.
In the white sculpture the small glazed elements are bits of debris generated in the process of making the form. The base of this sculpture is made from logs collected in the wildfire burn scars of the Rocky Mountains, near my studio in Colorado. The green form sits on a base made from polished concrete. The cast concrete was mixed with fragments of other related sculptures.
In this way each sculpture holds a record of it’s own ancestry – reflecting back on the way in which it came into being, I like to imagine this as a form of consciousness.
