This Artist Recreated a Magnificent 40-Foot-Tall Tree From the Cascade Mountains by Hand
Artist John Grade painstakingly built a 150-year-old giant hemlock out of half a million blocks of reclaimed wood
“The making of these trees was so much in that spirit—in terms of dodging the ease of digital and instead doing this all by hand,” says Grade. (Ron Blunt/ Renwick Gallery/ SAAM)
For the grand reopening of Washington, D.C.’s Renwick Gallery, artist John Grade set out to do something grand.
He wanted to bring a 40-foot tree into the gallery. He had just the tree in mind—a 150-year-old hemlock located in the Cascade Mountains (east of the artist’s Seattle home). About the same age as the Renwick itself, and a size that would just fit into the gallery space if hung parallel to the floor, the grand old hemlock was ideal for the site-specific project Grade had in mind.
But as a lover of nature whose works play on the ideas of natural degradation and man’s impact on the environment, Grade was not about to chop the hemlock down. As an artist who prizes handcrafted detail, he also was not interested in using any digital tools to copy the tree’s dimensions. He had a much more elegant—if far more complicated—plan.
He hired arborists to work with his team; who roped up the tree, setting up a pulley system to haul up buckets of water, so that a handcrafted plaster cast of the tree could be rendered—all while ensuring that the magnificent tree was carefully protected throughout the process.
The original tree’s doppelganger is woven out of wood.
“I could have been very practical and gone in and scanned this tree in an hour,” says Grade. “But actually being up in the tree and getting the sense of the thing more intimately flowing down was important for myself and for the people casting it.”
Once the cast was made, he brought the shell of the hemlock back to his studio, in large segments. And that was when things got even more complicated.
Using about a half million segments of reclaimed, old-growth cedar—each scrap individually measured, trimmed and sanded—Grade and his team began gluing a piece at a time to the cast. In this way, over many months and with the help of hundreds of volunteers, he was able to recreate each detail of the original tree by hand, creating the original tree’s doppelganger woven out of wood.
The work, titled Middle Fork, is part of the inaugural exhibition “Wonder,” opening November 13, when the doors of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery finally reopen after a major two-year renovation. The show brings together nine artists, including Grade, charged with the task of inspiring awe by transforming the space with their site-specific installations.
Middle Fork is about the same age as the Renwick itself, and a size that would just fit into the gallery space if hung parallel to the floor.
Important to Grade was the fact that it was a group effort. While Grade guided the process, he opened it up to “anyone who wanted to be involved with the project,” in the studio space, with 50 feet of windows in a very busy part of Seattle.
“The idea was people walking by,” says Grade, “would be invited in to join us.”
Volunteers were started on simple sections of wood, shaping them with one of Grade’s assistants right at their side helping guide them. Experienced volunteers could tackle sections that were more complex: those where the bark folded in on itself or where a limb connected into a trunk of a tree.
Read the full story at Smithsonian.