Sculptures by JMikk

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Cello

Tree:  Black Cherry

Dimensions:  65" x 28" 25"

"Cello" and "Untamed" were sculpted from the same ~150 year old black cherry tree that had died and fallen over on an old fence line on my cousin's tree farm.  In fact I made both sculptures from the same 8-ft log, which was so large and massive that I needed to either reduce its size or risk trying to make two sculptures.  After a lot of consideration and rolling the log over and over, I cut the log at a diagonal, parallel to the decayed opening, to produce two sculptures each about 5-ft tall.  To visualize how "Cello" and "Untamed" fit together, turn "Cello" upside down and place it above "Untamed", matching the two diagonal surfaces.

Of course nature had been trying to recycle this tree for many years--most of the tree was hollowed from fungal decay and I simply removed the rot down to sound wood.  The rough surface on the inside of the base is partly discolored by remnants of the decay that I left to honor the reclamation process.  One of the most interesting features of both "Cello" and "Untamed" is a separation of two growth rings completely around trunk of the tree to produce a cylinder within a cylinder.  It is likely that this separation had been caused by a violent wind event about 20 years before the tree died.  Fungi invaded the tree trunk to spread its mycelia into the gap, and some of that dried mycelia remains as a tan paper-like sheet in several places on both sculptures.

The original appearance of "Cello", with the long taper produced by the diagonal cut, reminded me of a treble clef.  But since that long taper also included a thin slice of wood between the wind split and the internal decay, I sculpted that thin slice parallel to the grain to allow it to bend without breaking.  You can carefully "pluck" that thin shaft as though it were a "string" and a knob of rough-finished wood on top of the "neck" completed the imagined "Cello".  Finally, left a natural edge of either bark or sapwood that had been adjacent to the cambium, one of my signature features, to guide the viewer’s eye around the larger forms.

I coat my sculptures with a wipe-on polyurethane finish which is easy to clean and maintain, so I encourage the viewer to enjoy the natural beauty of this spectacular piece of wood both visually and tactually.