Sculptures by JMikk

This sculpture is one of three I  made from a black cherry tree that died and fell over on an old fence line on my cousin's tree farm.  The log that I selected for this sculpture was the butt and thus contained the region to which were attached the barbed wire fencing.  Not only did I retain a few strands of wire, I also utilized the many regions of blackened wood stained by iron migration over the years.  You might say that the "tree rusted".

Of course nature had been trying to recycled this tree for many years: most of the tree was hollowed from fungal decay and I simply cleaned it up so that the open form of the sculpture was determined almost entirely by nature.  One of the most interesting aspects was a wind slip in the grain which dated to about 20 years before the tree died.  That separation of grain invited fungus to spread mycelia into the space and that mycelia remains as a paper-like sheet throughout the sculpture.  I integrated the elongated parallel rib or ridge forms to follow the separating cracks completely around the sculpture, and left a natural edge, one of my signature features, to guide the viewer’s eye around the larger forms.

The rough left side of the piece looks a bit like a rooster.  It was only an inch or so thick, and was naturally formed by weathering of the bark-free wood.  Naming this piece was difficult, but a friend suggested "Untamed" for the piece in our joint show entitled, "On the Wild Side",  at the Penn State HUB in 2014.

Tree: Cherry, Warriors Mark, PA

Dimensions: 58" x 36" x 17"

Untamed