This sculpture was made from the trunk and root ball of a Camphor Laurel tree and, was made over a 2-year period between 2008 and mid 2010. It began with my receiving a call from a local eco farmer who knew my work. He told me he had a gift for me if I wanted it. I could do what I liked with it.
At my first viewing of it I was pretty mixed with both overwhelm and excitement. I knew the project could be a success having seen smaller versions of tree stumps transformed by fire and elevated into sculptural shapes around the district. I knew that my work with this wood would be unique and preferably highly polished, but it would take a huge amount of work and persistence.
Work on this piece began around the beginning of 2008. Firstly I saw that the root ball was completely crammed tight with very hard Sandy soil. I needed to get a pressure washer, one which was very high-pressure, in fact 4 1/2 thousand PS I pressure, to begin the process of cleaning away this embedded soil. I could only just see fragments of the snapped off roots at the surface of the soil, I was aware that underneath the soil there was a whole story waiting to unfold.
I returned again and again to the sculpture over the two-year period with the same pressure washer. Each time I worked on it blasting away for 4 to 5 hours a time. I was decked out in my wetsuit hat and goggles and my gumboots and always within the first 15 minutes I was completely black from all of dark soil spitting back at me. I became accustomed to this and actually came to enjoy the process, as I was getting to see further and further what was underneath.
It was really a Joy to see this beauty being revealed. Hard work bought out the true essence of this tree and the more I worked on it, the more I feel it spoke to me about what it wanted me to reveal. So I just went with it, coming to terms with the regular sense of overwhelm, by simply working on section by section until at the end of each day I had covered a great deal of territory.
At one point it became very important for me to start fashioning the overall shape into what I believe became a very streamlined one. There were two trunks coming out the back, I had one removed with chainsaws and the face and overall roundish shape I also determined by the use of chainsaws. Later towards the end I was able to use grinders, sanding machines and other woodworking tools to smooth off all of the edges and prepare to work for its final air blowing, which removed all of the last fragments of soil and wood shavings.
Then it was time for the application of the organic oils, which I ended up buying three coats of. Later as a final gesture, I applied a couple of coats of beeswax mixed with Johoba oil, which really made the wood sing.
As a final way of saluting this beautiful piece, I arranged for a beautifully prepared concrete polished plinth to be made for the root ball face and trunk where it met the ground. These plinths provided the final elevation of this work into its glory. I learned so much from working with this piece. I was also very happy to receive the honour of the People’s choice award at the “artsCape Bienialle”, which was held in my hometown of Byron Bay during June and July of 2010.
