S3E2 WOOD
Transcript
ML = Maren Loveland
SR=Seri Robinson
ST=Shinji Turner
EV = Emma Vendetta
JG = Jennifer Gutman
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INTRODUCTION
ML:
“Literature is nothing but carpentry,” writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez says.
“With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood. Both are full of tricks and techniques. Basically very little magic and a lot of hard work.”
Wood working and art, as Marquez notes, are one and the same. They do not come naturally. They are sustained practices that require our attention, diligence, and time.
But I think I might disagree with Marquez—at least a little bit. Carpentry, and literature for that matter, seem to be just as full of magic as they are of pure grit.
How do you turn one of the oldest and most common resources, into, say, the grand carved doors of a cathedral? Or life-size sculptures that replicate the texture of human skin? Yes, it takes hard work. But you have to admit—the act of creating through the medium of wood is really nothing short of a miracle.
Today’s episode is focused completely on WOOD. Woodworking, like writing, comes in all shapes and forms. We’ll first talk with Shiji Turner-Yamamoto, an environmental artist whose study of trees brings a whole new insight to the meaning of woodworking. We’ll talk to artist and scientist Seri Robinson, whose research and artistry revolves around the use of fungi in wood, and what lessons we can learn from wood itself.
Wood is ancient, full of mysteries and possibilities—but also a precious resource, increasingly endangered. Today, we dive into this mystical medium to uncover what it has to offer us in this unique era of climate change.
PART 1: SHINJI TURNER-YAMAMOTO
ML:
Shinji Turner-Yamamoto’s work is meditative, timeless, and thought-provoking. His Global Tree Project, which is the focus of our episode, seeks to place found trees in unique spaces where both the tree and the space become transformed by one another. He goes to different locations, sources trees (both living and dead) and installs them in spaces that he describes as “at the threshold,” often in states of disrepair or transition. The result is often haunting, or maybe peaceful, depending on how you look at it. For instance, a single tree, planted in an abandoned building, illuminated by a ray of light pouring out of a broken, decaying roof. The result is contemplative, spiritual, almost.
We’ll get into the details of Shinji’s tree project, but I first wanted to hear about what inspired him to be an artist.
ST:
It didn’t happen in a museum. I was in Rome at the Pantheon looking up at the Oculus, when suddenly it began to rain inside this building, it became this isolated vertical shaft of rain. It was just sublime with entering a 2000-year old manmade space, and somehow the rain felt very slow, almost slow motion.
Architecture became landscape. Then the sky became a guest. The moment changed my sense of materials, of matter, not just as materials, but as memory, memories of weather, geological history, and time. So when I work with trees, I’m listening for that same presence.
ML:
This memory so gracefully describes Shinji’s art practice: it’s all about connecting time, environment, and architecture. I can see why this moment would have inspired him so profoundly—just imagining that beautiful column of rain in the pantheon is such a lovely image.
What I love about Shinji’s work is how it redefines situated understandings of materials.
ST:
So the Project’s core is defined by installations with actual trees living and dead. Here the tree is a collaborator, not just material or resource. The tree becomes a sort of mirror for our own existence in the universe. So now imagine a beautiful large tree in a garden.
One day you notice there is something wrong. It is dying. You don’t want to just cut down the tree, so you decide to perform a personal ritual. You uproot the whole tree, reposition it upside down, and plant a young tree at the top of the upside down dead tree.
It looks as if they are connected through the root systems for this ritual. Then now you’re wondering what to do with this young tree and the dead one. A series of such rituals is the Global Tree Project.
ML:
Shinji’s work is all about reconnecting the human with nature, specifically trees. For him, that primarily has happened with significant experiences with trees.
ST:
What I am looking for is a poetic reunion with nature. The tree is in that sense our twin, the project is about this connection with the tree and the forest and the universe.
ML:
His process emphasizes discovery, exploration, and engagements with specific locations.
One of my favorite pieces features a tree suspended by wires in a Cincinnati Ohio Holy Cross cathedral. I was curious if the how Shinji got the idea for working with trees as sculptural entities in the first place.
ST:
It was not conceptualized from the outset. It finally took shape after a powerful storm. I walked into a forest and encountered a very large majestic oak, but uprooted lying on a hill as if sleeping.
A few days later, it was just gone and its place, A scar and a large mound of rural earth. I envisioned a new tree growing from that mound that same day. I began a series of drawing with henna powder as pigment, an image called sleeping tree, which became the Project Foundation. And looking back, I know why that uncannily magnificent tree felt sleeping, not dead. It wasn’t entirely uprooted. Part of the root system still held the ground and the crown cut, lush green leaves. It seems at rest like the reclining Buddha, a quiet passage toward the death into Nirvana.
ML:
Shinji’s Global Tree Projects are born out of a coeval process of paying attention to trees and to landscapes, they really need to be seen in context, as you might imagine. Shinji is fascinated with how trees connect us to time—but we’re often not aware of these scales. But there are aspects of his work that can’t be seen directly, like the way they sometimes take us out of the immediate context by exposing us to deep time.
ST:
So for me, it was a way to bring life itself into my work. The presence of life is mysterious across cultures. The tree stands for life. It has been our companion in pondering and in meditation on the universe. Beyond the climate, carbon and cooling, think oxygen, food, water, and soil.
ML:
Trees, Shinji explains, are vital to human life. Shinji instructs us how to care for trees both living and dead. Trees shouldn’t just be used as a resource, or celebrated as mere decorations—they should be honored and recognized as complex systems that operate on far different scales than humans. As such, Shinji approaches creating art with trees very carefully.
ST:
So environmental questions arise at, basically every stage of a project, if I envision using a dead tree for an installation, in general, the curators, arborists, and I begin looking for a candidate. When we find the tree, it often redefines our work. The project becomes concretely rooted in that site. I decide the detail of the installation, of course, but I also plan the afterlife after the exhibition.
Where should the living tree go and where should the dead tree go or return? At Reston, Virginia,
ML:
Shinji is referring to a tree project he worked on at an arts center in Reston, Virginia.
ST:
At Reston, Virginia, the tree we found a dogwood was dying from over mulching. So too much care or simply wrong care. Or maybe we treat trees as decorations and that is the issue.
The arborists warned us before we dug the trees, that the root system would be growing around and around choking itself with its own roots. It’s really strange. I looked, and it was true, it looked really strange when we lifted it. One third of the tree was already dead. Then I noticed a young sling, stubborn attached to the dead tree’s roots, a volunteer tree they call.
ML:
Improper care of trees results in their mistreatment, caused by, as Shinji explains, the troubling ways that we think about trees—just as decorations, a mere resource we can use and extract at our will. This kind of thinking often leads to their destruction—so much so that the tree begins to hurt itself. Even ordinary trees are subject to this kind of violence. But, even out of that destruction, life and resilience is possible.
ST:
It felt like a message I had chosen the right tree. So yes, fragility and resilience, both at once. A delicate choice which way to go with what we know now. Both can be right either way, the tree continues as collaborator, as teacher, as material. Now what first inspired me to work with trees this way, partly answered with that strong fallen oak. But there is another source–ruins, archeological and contemporary.
What I call threshold ruins, the borderland where matter takes over and landscape returns and time becomes visible. That border is where my work lives.
ML:
I really love this term, “threshold ruins.” Shinji is able to capture something magical through his intense attention to the strange border spaces where architectures sometimes live, turning our minds towards the in-between, the unfinished, the decaying. All spaces where the relationship between time, materials, and the environment are in a state of flux.
This in-between, borderland state is partly evoked because it represents an important theme in Shinji’s work: environmental melancholia:
ST:
So I grew up in Osaka. Especially on sunny days, we stayed inside for smog warnings. Looking back, it was worse than I remembered. 1973 there were over 300 days with warnings. The Dotonbori canal where my father swam had turned black. L ater as a teenager, I felt a certain ache, but I didn’t have the words.
ML:
I really relate to this feeling, I think we all do. A dull melancholy that sets in when we begin to contemplate the lasting effects of human-generated climate change. But can this be a productive feeling? Shinji seems to think so.
ST:
Looking at the history of art and architecture since prehistory, shaping stone and space has been our second nature. It is encoded in us. It’s how we feel and think with matter, and it is capable of letting the environmental melancholia emerge, become visible.
ML:
Rather than letting this feeling stall his work, Shinji lets environmental melancholia fuel it. This is a driving emotion of his art.
ST:
In my work, I bring matter: fossils, minerals, rocks, water, and trees, fragment of nature into the perceivable dimension so that geological memory, time and the elements can be felt. Art is how we listen and feel with matter, with living matter. We are listening to the environment or rather the universe.
ML:
When we hear the word melancholia, we might associate it with purely so-called “bad” feelings. But I think what Shinji is saying here and with the Global Tree Project is that this state of transition, even with widespread destruction, is ultimately a moment to reflect on our space in the world and realize that this threshold, this borderland is a space and time for possibility, for change, for growth.
ST:
Sometimes I use collected fossils, and I use as a pigments. And when I know that this pigments that I have is 450 million a year-old fossil dust–it’s, it changed certain, perspective.
ML:
It’s true—when you think about materials being millions of years old, it changes the way you think about them. It’s humbling to realize how miniscule we are. We change the earth, and it changes us in turn.
PART 2: WOOD SCIENCE AND ART
ML:
To learn a bit more about wood itself, I decided to talk to Seri Robinson, a wood scientist and artist based in Corvallis, Oregon. I sat down with them to chat about wood, fungi, and folklore.
SR:
I am a professor at Oregon State University in the Department of Wood Science and Engineering. My background is actually in woodworking, a specialization in wood turning, which is what most of my degrees are in one form or another. My main area of art and research is in spalted wood, which is a very old art form where you use certain kinds of fungi that excrete colorants into wood, and you use that to naturally color wood for various artistic applications.
ML:
Seri is a fascinating individual. They span so many different roles in such a unique way— they are a woodworker, a craftsman, an artist, a scientist, a professor. Some people might see these roles as being at odds with one another. But that’s all the more exciting, because in this way, they’re challenging the often-strict methods of categorizing people. Instead of being easily definable, Seri defies categories in ways that expand our understanding of what it means to be an artist, or a scientist. No, these roles aren’t at odds. They’re wildly compatible.
I had so many questions to ask them. But one thing I had to get off my chest—what exactly is the difference between wood working and wood turning?
SR:
Woodworking is, I mean it’s a lot of flat work. So using boards of wood that are flat to then join or do whatever with, to make furniture or cabinetry that sort of stuff. Wood turning. Is a specialized field within that where you use a wood lathe. So if you think of a potter’s wheel that spins, a wood lathe is like a potter’s wheel, but on its side.
And so the wood spins really fast, and then you take a tool, a long piece of metal and shove it into the spinning wood to carve it. It’s a little bit more sculptural. It can be very functional, like that’s how they make table legs and things like that. So you could do it from a furniture side, but I use it primarily for sculptural work.
ML:
Wood can be shaped and fashioned in what feels like a million different methods. Woodworking, turning, carving, whittling. But what you do with wood directly depends on what kind of wood is used, how old it is, where it comes from. Seri helped enlighten my understanding with an exercise they do with students that helps illustrate the diverse compositions of wood.
SR:
If you Google, like, what is wood? You’ll find a million different people saying fundamentally the same thing. If you think of wood as like a bunch of collections of straws, right? Which is very simplistic, I would say, and perhaps too simplistic because I think it, it doesn’t, it leads to misunderstandings of how wood works.
ML:
Many people tend to think of wood as a completely uniform set of fibers.
But really, it’s a lot more than that.
SR:
A lot of the cells in wood do run, they are a bit hollow on the inside and they do run up and down, but there’s also cells in a tree that run in and out. And when I make my students do like modeling with straws, we often use smoothie straws, big fat smoothie straws for the early wood, the springwood. And then we’ll use maybe regular straws for the late wood to show a difference. And then we’ll take coffee stir straws. And stick them at 90 degrees to those straws to show the ray cells, to show how conduction can happen in and out of the tree.
ML:
Trees aren’t just a collection of identical fibers—there’s a lot of variation happening on the inside.
SR:
So if you could just broaden your understanding of wood a little bit more to understand that the straws can go in any kind of orientation: that helps quite a bit with your understanding of wood and also that, it’s primarily at its base made up of sugar.
ML:
The basic building blocks are cellulose, glucose, and lignin.
SR:
And then the stuff that differs is like one to 2% of these little other things.
ML:
So, all wood is essentially composed of the same stuff. But then how do you explain all the different types of wood that vary in color, texture, and pattern? And what about within certain species, like oak, maple, rosewood, cedar, cherry, walnut, and tons of other wood varieties?
SR:
You can tell like species for the most part apart anatomically like with a microscope. But then within species, obviously there’s gonna be a lot of variation. Think about how much variation is within the human species, right? So we’re all fundamentally the same, but we’ll have regional differences, especially like over time.
And so trees are like that too. A sugar maple growing in Eastern Michigan may have some slight variations to a sugar maple that was planted out here on the west coast, ’cause they don’t grow here natively. But yeah, there’s always gonna be a little bit of a difference.
But the big differences, of course, occur across species and across families and things like that.
ML:
People are really more like wood than we might think. They are uniquely individual, while sharing many similarities with other kinds of wood. They are deeply influenced by place and time. So in this current time of climate crisis, how does that affect wood and those working with it?
SR:
Climate change in general usually means that there’s more wood to work with that’s come down naturally just because as the world warms, more tropical pests move their way into temperate landscapes that they couldn’t live in previously. And so that affects more and more of our trees. And then there’s more down trees, so you end up with a lot more like dead wood to work with. Most wood turners in particular don’t purchase wood. It’s like you can drive around after a storm and pick up 30 years worth of wood off the side of the street.
ML:
So, practically, there are some benefits to the increased rate of wood turnover in forests. Wood workers are able to harvest it more easily. Or, for someone like Shinji, to turn fallen trees into artistic monuments.
For Seri specifically, who uses fungi in their work, warmer temperatures mean today they don’t need to wait for the perfect climate to create spalted designs—a curious, unexpected side effect of planetary overheating
SR:
In the Pacific Northwest and especially in this Corvallis area and a little bit farther north, we’re in this temperate rainforest zone. So we get a lot of rain and it’s quite warm, but it’s warmer than it has been. Every year is warmer, right? And so that means that the fungi here don’t really go into, at least the fungi I work with, don’t really go dormant nearly as long.
And so the cycle from downwood to spalted wood is much faster, which is a benefit for me artistically, and I think you could argue is a benefit for the forest in terms of recycling, because that’s what these fungi are doing is that they are more quickly than recycling the wood back down into soil so that the nutrients can come back up.
But I can’t imagine it’s a benefit for the trees themselves who would prefer, not to be stressed out.
ML:
Things weren’t always this way, though.
SR:
I remember growing up, when we’d go out looking for wood, you’d have to like kind of hope to be the first on the scene, to get the best parts of the tree. And now I don’t see like trees claimed hardly. Like maybe little pieces of them, but not, there’s not really a lot of fighting, which is fine. Climate change means more trees come down. So there’s just, everyone’s got wood. Like it’s not short.
ML:
Foraging for wood might work for wood turners and other small-scale artists like Seri, but what about at an industrial scale? According to Seri that’s an entirely different question. For professional cabinet makers and manufacturers working with wood, though, they don’t have the luxury of finding their own. The process for them requires distance from the wood because it has to, in order for their businesses to be viable.
SR:
You’ve got like 16 middlemen in there. So that’s the issue with wood turning. There’s usually no middleman, right? So we go treat a final product. With wood working, especially if you’re talking about high-end cabinetry cabinet shops. So they are going to purchase their wood from some type of specialty lumber seller, hopefully at wholesale so they can get better prices.
ML:
Woodworking is complicated business—there are many steps and processes involved. As a result, there’s very instrumental relationship between woodworkers and the tree—it’s treated as a resource, not as a living being. As a scientist and someone working at the intersection of craft and art, Seri is bringing a different approach to wood than Shinji, one that is more so rooted in the demands of customers, consumers, students, and scientific evidence.
I pointed out to Seri that maybe this is the problem—that rapid consumption and climate change is happening as a result of there being this disconnection in the creation process due to the demands of the market. But, as Seri insisted, people need to eat.
SR:
We all get into this because we love wood and we love trees, and we wanna be a part of that sort of natural resource cycle.
But there’s no way that you could ever survive and pay your mortgage and have a family as a fine woodworker, if you went from tree to cabinets yourself, you could do that maybe once for your house, as like a specialty project, but you would not, it would never be economical.
I’m certain that many woodworkers would love to be more connected, but I just don’t think it’s it’s just not a feasible option for them either.
As much as like woodworking can be this really beautiful thing where you’re like, you’re really connected to the material. You also have to eat. And that’s always like this, balance between art and economics.
ML:
I think what we landed on is somewhere in the middle. No, it’s impossible for our world to function if every manufacturer or table maker starts cutting their own wood. It’s just not going to work. However, we can make the system better by looking for ethically sourced wood—but just know that it comes at a price.
SR:
I think it’s probably important for your listeners to know that if you want to make sure that you’re getting wood that has been sustainably harvested, you would wanna go for FSC certified wood. Now it’s obviously much more expensive, but the, that wood has a chain of it called, there’s a word for it, like a chain of ownership, but a chain of something where you can see exactly where the wood came from and so you can check that it went through the proper processing and handling the whole way through. And this is to help prevent illegal logging.
Tropical woods in high demand in the United States. We love those pretty colors and we wanna use it, but most of it’s illegally logged. So the only way to make sure that you got something from a sustainably harvested forest that didn’t encroach on native land and things like that is through FSC certification. You’ll pay for it, but they can produce paper and receipts for every single place that wood was all the way back to the original landowner of the forest and the consent for sale. And so it can be done and so you can have that connection, but it is pricey.
ML:
Seri wants us to care more for the wood we encounter in our daily lives. Use them, relate to them, with care, with respect. Rely on ethically sourced wood. Learn from trees, perhaps even think a little more like trees. Adapt to shifting circumstances rather than control them at all costs.
Listening to Seri, I think of the work of Emanuele Coccia, his book The Life of Plants. In it, Coccia emphasizes that life on Earth, our atmosphere and fragile zone of existence, would be impossible without plants and trees; they also offer models of less instrumental relations to our environment. Plants, and by extension trees, he writes “embody the most direct and elementary connection that life can establish with the world.”
I am also thinking of what I once heard about araucaria trees in South America, the pehuen, or monkey-puzzle tree. They grow in very specific altitudes, up to a height of 30 to 40 meters. Their pine nuts are a staple of Mapuche diet and storytelling, nutritious and sacred at once. But what’s most fascinating, they are enormously resilient and adaptive. With their thick and scale-like leaves, these trees are in fact what botanists call dioecious. They switch gender in moments of environmental distress: females volunteer as males to secure the survival of entire groves.
INTERFERENCE 2: WOOD AND GENDER
JG:
Wow, let me chime in here. This is really fascinating, Maren. Not just the idea that we should learn to see and sense the world like trees, like wood. But also that trees can switch their genders, can be trans, perhaps even queer. What do you think, Emma?
EV:
I agree, Jen. I find it kind of depressing that wood is so overwhelmingly thought of as masculine, don’t you think? Do we really need to sexualize inanimate objects or assign stable gender identities to them??
JG:
Haven’t you heard of the Massa Marittima mural?
EV:
No…I’m scared.
JG:
It’s a 13th-century mural in Italy that depicts a tree with, well, phalluses growing off its branches. Not much innuendo there.
EV:
So really, wood representing fertility and male genitalia is nothing new—it goes back to medieval times?
JG:
Yep. Isn’t that wild? It’s weird, but it does help explain why wood and woodworking brings to mind all things manly. The sexy lumberjack trope, Ron Swanson from Parks and Rec, the list goes on.
EV:
But women have been involved in woodworking since the middle ages, too—certain women were trained in guilds under master craftsmen in wood trades.
JG:
And many women are involved in woodworking today—but I’ve noticed that even some of these women tend to approach it through a “masculine” lens. Often it seems that when women present themselves as woodworkers, all about their strength, their roughness, etc.
All fantastic traits—but still kind of gendered, no?
EV:
That’s a totally fair point. That’s why I’m super inspired by the growing communities of queer woodworkers across the world. Just listen to this artist statement by queer woodworker Phoebe Kuo, it brings such a beautiful nuance to the art form:
“In terms of process, my practice takes traditional techniques and places them in nontraditional contexts. I adapt coopering, which is traditionally used in barrel making, to make site specific sculptures that refuse the normal placement of both furniture and art. My work often occupies spaces that are overlooked, like corners, borders, and edges. I place it in what appears to be a precarious position—but it does just fine.”
JG:
So, Phoebe is taking traditional woodworking practices and subverting them—totally subverting the patriarchal systems that are kind of inherently ingrained in the practive. How awesome!
EV:
Definitely inspiring. So it turns out, wood doesn’t HAVE to be gendered. Even if there are trees full off.
JG:
Ok, signing off now.
PART 3: THE ART OF WOODTURNING
ML:
As I mentioned earlier, Seri’s work defies boundaries, helps us to think beyond rigid categories and norms. It enlarges our understanding of what wood is, what art is, and what it means to be creative.
If we can find ways to be more connected to the materials that make up our worlds, and finding ways to ensure they are ethically sourced, we’ll have more opportunities to make better decisions and hopefully reduce unethical practices.
No, it’s not a perfect process, but it is the road to progress.
Earlier, I mentioned that that Seri works with “spalted” wood,
SR:
So spalting is like any like kind of color produced by decay fungi. It has to be decay fungi, because there are lots of fungis make color right? Think about bread mold, that’s green, right? That’s not spalting, that’s bread mold. It has to be from a decay fungus because that means the color goes like into the wood and the fungus can decay the wood.
ML:
Think about the fungi as a kind of medium, a paint of sorts that Seri works with to create color and pattern in wood. Seri makes a variety of objects, including bowls, cups, vases, and other sculptures that look like marble hued with tones of green, brown, red, and purple, to name a few. Seri considers spalting a technique full of possibilities.
SR:
It matters because they’re a very different type of colorant and they are like UV stapled–they don’t degrade with sunlight, they don’t move with water, so they have very specific properties. And and they could be anything. They could be like black or green or yellow or pink, or you could do all kinds of crazy colors.
ML:
So what does the process of creating a piece of art with spalting look like?
SR:
First I have to make a decision about whether I want to forage the wood or whether I wanna make it, because spalting is something you can induce yourself. I grow the fungi in my lab. I have them so I can get a piece of wood and I can grow the fungi on the piece of wood I choose. Or I can go into the woods and find something that’s already spalted–that doesn’t usually work out so well because it’s super decayed. And so it doesn’t turn well.
You don’t wanna put something really soft and chewed up on something that’s gonna spin it really fast.
ML:
There’s a kind of magic to this process, an unpredictable nature that leaves the spalting up to chance. If Seri doesn’t control the spalting itself, what parts do they control?
SR:
Usually it’s about finding a piece of wood that I wanna work with, and usually that means that it needs to be visually interesting before the spalting. So I really like to work with Figured Woods, which going back to our beginning conversation, if we’re thinking about all those straws and how most of them are growing upright, in figured woods, those straw angles change. And so they can grow at like 40 fives or 20 degree angles. And so it, it gives this weird loopy pattern to the wood grain. And I really like that because it contrasts with the colors of the spalting.
So I’ll select for wood that grew wrong, basically messed up wood, figured wood. And then I will look for some piece of wood that maybe already has a little bit of spalting already. That’s really important because the, even though I’m gonna dry the wood and kill the fungi that are on it, they leave behind that color and those chemical signatures, because color is a chemical. And so when I put other fungi on, they’ll, quote unquote “smell” these other fungi and it freaks ’em out.
ML:
Seri isn’t controlling the spalting, exactly, but they are using controllable factors to ensure they get the best response possible based on their knowledge of how fungi and wood work.
SR:
Spalting is a stress response and so they’ll think, oh, there’s other fungi on here. And then they’ll secrete more color. If I can get a piece that already like smells like fungus, then it’s a lot easier to get my fungi to have panic attacks on the wood.
So you need to engage the fungi, right? You need to get them into this place where they’re like, I could win this battle, like this victory could be mine. I just have to work a little harder. And put out just a little more color to control my resource. So then it’s a game of time and checking and seeing, how much green, how much pink, how much, like what color balance do you want?
ML:
Talking to Seri was the first time I’d ever heard of spalted wood. But it’s been a crucial part of human history since forever.
SR:
Llots of cultures around the world have used spalted wood. There’s spalted wood in some of the highest end cups for like Japanese tea ceremonies. They use spalted wood on Easter Island on Rapa Nui. It’s used all over the world. Like every culture has engaged with it in one way or another, or they haven’t engaged with it and they’ve built mythology around it.
ML:
Seri told me about how they were working with the Chilean government, giving workshops on woodturning and spalted wood in the forests of Chile. In one of their workshops, a couple of the students started giggling when they showed Seri and piece of blue-green colored wood.
SR:
They were giggling and I was like, what’s going on? And they said where we grew up, you’re not supposed to touch this wood. And I was like, that’s really, why is that? And it’s because it’s surrounded by this myth of the Trauco, which is like this like really hideous little man with no feet who lives in the forest. And he’s like magic. And apparently the myth is that like any woman who sees him like, instantly has sex with him. Like she can’t say no. And this is how they explained like unwed mothers at the time. But the blue green wood is supposed to be the poo of the Trauco. And so you wouldn’t touch it ’cause you don’t wanna bring the Trauco on. Yeah. Spalted wood is just so interestingly connected to humanity and I really love that. Like it’s fascinated us forever.
ML:
In every language, there are different kinds of ways of describing spalted wood. In fact, it kind of makes it difficult to talk about, cross-culturally, sometimes, for this very reason. But this is why spalted wood as is the perfect medium for Seri—it’s unpredictable, uncontrollable, and it breaks the rules.
SR:
A lot of my sculptural work has to do with bodies and body shapes and understanding like the growth of the human body. And I do a lot of that in terms of sculptural work. And it’s important to me because, so I’m intersex, which is a congenital issue, of course, where like you don’t necessarily have the, quote unquote “correct” physical characteristics for your sex chromosomes. It’s not transgenderism. That’s a different situation. And so I’ve always been very fascinated by how a body becomes male or becomes female or when it stops in between.
ML:
Through Seri’s practice of woodturning, they’re able to ask questions about gender in the way they approach the practice of cutting wood.
SR:
When you’re wood turning and you’re making sweeping cuts, you’re cutting off like a fair bit of wood, maybe like an inch of wood or so at a time. And you can see the shape of the bowl change as you come around the curvature. And depending upon where you stop with that cut, it changes the functionality of the piece.
So if you leave a rim on the top, then you know you’ve got like little handles. If you leave it on the bottom, then it’s a foot and things like that. So I did a whole series of pieces where I stopped the cut. Where the cut is, does that dictate the function of the piece? Does the form have to dictate the function? Can we change how we interpret it? I do a lot of inversion pieces where the form on one side will have some interior and exterior cuts, and then, I did a series once where it was mirrored, so the form completely went through the other side.
I did one where it was soft on one side and very jagged on the other. In in those particular pieces I was thinking about the like ovaries and testicles. Testicles really, where they’re like, they’re the same organ, right? Except one is interior and flipped in the other one it’s exterior and flipped out. And so I was making a bunch of pieces where it was interior and exterior flipping.
ML:
If you’re interested in Seri’s work, there are images on our website and social media that you can take a look at, I highly recommend it. As I learned from Seri, wood is a medium of possibilities, of experimentation, and of questions, and ultimately:
SR:
Wood is a rabbit hole.
PART 4: SHINJI PT 2 – WOOD VS. TREES
ML:
When I first invited Shinji to do this episode, he was a bit hesitant. Why, he asked, was the episode called “wood?”
ST:
It is interesting because in Japanese. Especially ancient Japanese and everyday Japanese, it’s telling that word key means tree and key also means wood. Traditionally, I think we didn’t distinguish tree and wood
ML:
Shinji really helped me to think: at what point does a tree become wood? What really is the difference? Why do we make that distinction in the language?
ST:
When people go to, see my installations and I don’t think they say “This is wood.” Like, they would say even that it is tree. So you should put both wood and tree, maybe. [laughs]
ML:
Definitely a fair point. When we talk about wood, we’re talking about the environment through a human-centric view. Wood is a resource that we use, that is bought and sold— wood is a commodity. When we think about the earth through the lens of the commodity, we lose a connection with the deep time of the earth, a connection which is at the heart of Shinji’s Global Tree Project.
ST:
Let’s go back 4.5 billion years to the time geologists, they called the Hadean Eon, when Earth and its Moon were nearly formed. The moon was much closer, about 20 times wider in the sky.
Its disc looked 400 times larger, so both glowed burning red. It is difficult to imagine such an earth, but geologically that’s how our planet began. Crystals, cooling, rocks, folding water carving. Then life emerged. This is our origin.
I feel, a near mystic connection to those cosmic and geological histories within our bodies. There’s an echo, a small ocean we carry. Our blood and the water inside our cells keep oceanic chemistry, a memory of ancient seas from 500 million years ago. So also living in ecological crisis is new in Mesopotamia.
Deforestation was already noted by the third millennium, BCE, later in Greece. Plato Described Attica as the skeleton of a sick man. We already belong to Earth. Art makes that visible through poetic epiphany.
The earth is the voice, the universe, the echo. After all, we are all made of stars, and so is the earth.
CONCLUSION
ML:
Shinji’s tree sculptures and Seri’s wood turning sculptures are evocative and inspiring pieces. But unless you’re regularly wandering forests, or catching their work at museums or international art festivals, the majority of our daily interactions with wood, I’d guess, come through our homes.
The materials we choose to incorporate in our homes have a huge impact on how we feel. Steel and concrete are strong, but often feel cold and industrial. Tile, stone, and ceramics bring in texture, color, and grit. Fabrics bring softness and pattern, glass brings light. But wood is such a fascinating material because it kind of does all of the above. It’s strong and durable, yet delicate enough to be decorative. It comes in a rainbow of colors. Every piece of wood is different—it’s predictable, yet endlessly variable.
Wood types go in and out of trend. Right now, warm-stained oak and walnut are at the top of the foodchain (often made to look like Danish teak), but in the early 2000’s, dark woods and stains were all the rage. The 70’s and 80’s, however, were defined by honey-colored woods like golden oak and pine (remember how wood paneled walls were all the rage?)
Wood trends in interior design reflect the larger cultural trends of the moment. Right now, many are turning towards rich, warm woods to bring in texture, color, and life to sad, millennial beige apartments—because no one is buying homes. Instead of making changes and renovations to properties they own, many people are faced with using thrifted furniture with character—often made of wood or wood veneer—to liven up their spaces.
Wood isn’t just decorative though, it structures our spaces. It’s crucial for framing. It’s often the basis of our floors, the constitution of our kitchen cabinets. But it can also be a fire hazard. Days after I moved to Los Angeles, the Los Angeles fires devastated Topanga Canyon, the Palisades, Altadena, and Pasadena. Brush fires in the dry forests and canyons spread to the wood-heavy, historic homes of these areas, destroying them forever. Driving through Malibu, these days, you can actually see the ocean—so much of the architecture burned down, just fragments of the wooden foundations remain on the coast, scraps of iron, remnants of concrete. It’s haunting to see these remnants, these “threshold ruins,” as Shinji would say.
Often, wood is implemented as a so-called “timeless” material. But really, what wood does is place us directly in time, tethers it to us in ways we don’t fully understand. Wood itself is a documenter of time—it catalogues and remembers. Is time itself lost in the destruction of wood? Do we, in a way, shape time when we work with it as an art form? We continue to search for the answers to these questions.