De-Constructed Monument
and Log Bench
Calumet Park fieldhouse
2016
Materials/Methods
This honey locust had been reduced to a single 15’ shaft before I started working on it. I debarked the top three feet (for the Corinthian capital) and several areas farther down the tree. For the capital, I installed three flat pieces that sit on top of the tree, four carved volutes (made of cedar and white oak) underneath the flat pieces and four carved acanthus details, made of white oak. Two of the flat pieces are made of cedar; the very top piece is made of aluminum, to protect the cedar from rotting. For the other tree details, I made a few pieces out of white oak, and I also carved directly into the tree.
Log Bench
Log Bench is a sculpture that serves as a viewing seat for De-constructed Monument, a tree sculpture twenty feet away from it that was created the year before. The two sculptures are connected in several ways. The most obvious is the fact that they are both logs that have been added to and carved into. But they are also similar in that they both contain figurative fragments—the face parts in the tree sculpture and the human arms on the bench. One of these arms is holding a squirrel. Whether this is a warm or aggressive gesture is not clear and represents our often ambivalent relationship to nature.
