Sculptures by JMikk

Merit Award in 2013 Images Show  (Central PA Festival of Arts)

Tree: Black Walnut, Los Altos Hills, CA
Height: 24” tall

 A stranger told me that a developer was bulldozing a fence line of old walnut trees up in the hills west of where I lived, so I went to investigate.  Most of the trees were mashed by the bulldozing, but one was uprooted without much damage to the trunk or roots. 

It was obvious that the sculpture was going to stand upside down with the roots forming a top surface.  The trunk was rotten inside so exposing that inner surface was tempting but it took a lot of consideration to figure out how to do that in an artist way.  In the end I took my inspiration from the largest five roots.  I knew from experience that, where roots and limbs compressed against the trunk during years of growth, there would be very wavy grain, referred to by the French term chatoyance.  So I made vanes extending from those major roots all the way down the trunk.  The only question remaining was how deep to make the cuts to expose the inner hollow.  That was trial and error, with the constraint that I couldn’t go back.

 A previous sculpture, Vanes, made from a 4-stemmed elm trunk, had 7 vanes and 3 interconnections, and consumed an inordinate amount of effort to sculpt and polish flat and smooth.  So I did not look forward to all that similar work on Black Fungi.  But the result was definitely worth it.  There is spectacular chatoyance on all five vanes and some on the top of the root section as well.  To help preserve the connection with the earth I left a few pieces of dried adobe soil in their cavities of the root structure.  This is probably my finest and favorite sculpture. 

Black Fungi