Working with Wood
There is something to be said about the woods—all of the nature surrounding us, our history, and our ancestors. It’s in our DNA, part of you and me. Innately, we cannot escape it, yet we are always amazed when it shows us how rooted we are on Earth. When we are young, the nature we experience is magical; it takes us away to a lovely melting pot of grounded imagination. We run and hide as the trees cover us in safety, light, and love. My soul has never forgotten what it was like to be here. To be surrounded by the trees, enraptured by their magic. These memories have left a warm glow within my heart. I was immediately transported to my childhood memories when we were given wood as the material for this project. In 1951, my grandfather returned from Germany, met my grandmother, and bought 30 acres. This purchase of 30 acres would change many lives, mine included. My mother is one of eight children, and before I was born, I’d like to think my soul circled this land as it waited for me to land firmly on its pine-covered ground.
Many blessings and beautiful moments came from this. My grandparents grew crops, provided for their family, and, most importantly, built a home from the ground up with the wood harvested on this land. The home they built was one in which I, too, experienced many beautiful moments. Running barefoot, lost in the woods, finding a newly hatched bird in the first light of spring, this was life itself to me. I was blessed enough to experience this beautiful piece of land until January 2023, when they sold 25 acres. I was heartbroken and felt as though a part of me was missing. So, when this project was presented to me, I went straight to my grandparents and asked for some scrap wood to put together a memento. They let me take a side panel from a pine tree left to rot in the barn. It was covered in dirt and had been lying around for god knows how long. The tip of this panel has a beautiful heartwood that could be seen after some brief sanding. The sapwood surrounding it was significantly lighter than the heartwood, leading me to believe there was a hard internal center that would be visible with more sanding. Carpenter ants and termites ate the outside as they built a home here, making it to the Vascular Cambium as their tunnels and caves were visible to the naked eye. The outside cork was nonexistent as it had been weathered from the years, but this was all sanded down as I focused solely on the Heartwood of this piece. The heart of the wood, the core and center of previous generations, came to light as I focused on peeling away the weathered, torn, and rotten layers. This revealed a beautiful center stuck in time, dried in sap, and smoothed with my hands. This encaptured me. The heartwood color, the smell, and the bright amber shined through when held up to the light. This is what I like to think my family is like, what every human is like. We have an outside that gets weathered and worn from life, but a beautiful natural light is in the center of us all. Whether we want to put in the work to chip away at all of the rotten edges that protect our beautiful center is our own choice. We are all connected in this way, and in this, we cannot hide. My piece looks similar to an embryo, nebula, or pulsing heartbeat, all of this subconscious yet intentional. This piece represents the center of life forming and touches on our interconnectedness, bringing me to the existential question: what came first? How did we start? Where do we go? And with this sculpture, I push others to question themselves deeply. In the center of it all, where do you find yourself, your light, your warmth?
