{"id":1519,"date":"2016-01-27T00:00:49","date_gmt":"2016-01-27T00:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/simonings.com\/?p=1519"},"modified":"2019-10-29T13:39:14","modified_gmt":"2019-10-29T13:39:14","slug":"staring-into-the-heart-of-an-artificial-tree","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=1519","title":{"rendered":"Staring into the heart of an artificial tree"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/tree.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-large wp-image-1505\" src=\"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/tree-1024x683.jpg\" alt=\"tree\" width=\"584\" height=\"390\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/tree-1024x683.jpg 1024w, http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/tree-300x200.jpg 300w, http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/tree-450x300.jpg 450w, http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/tree-900x600.jpg 900w, http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/tree.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 584px) 100vw, 584px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/2075300-staring-into-the-heart-of-an-artificial-tree\/\"><span data-sheets-value=\"{&quot;1&quot;:2,&quot;2&quot;:&quot;for New Scientist&quot;}\" data-sheets-userformat=\"{&quot;2&quot;:15235,&quot;3&quot;:{&quot;1&quot;:0},&quot;4&quot;:[null,2,16777215],&quot;10&quot;:2,&quot;11&quot;:4,&quot;12&quot;:0,&quot;14&quot;:[null,2,2171169],&quot;15&quot;:&quot;wf_segoe-ui_normal, 'Segoe UI', 'Segoe WP', Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif&quot;,&quot;16&quot;:11}\">for<em> New Scientist<\/em>, 27 January 2016<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<p>SEATTLE artist\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.johngrade.com\/\">John Grade<\/a>\u00a0makes much of his ecological credentials when discussing\u00a0<i>Middle Fork<\/i>\u00a0\u2013 his 500,000-piece wooden sculpture of a 150-year-old giant hemlock. No trees were felled or harmed in its making, he says, although someone must once have fashioned the timber bridge from which the thumb-sized blocks of cedar were reclaimed.<\/p>\n<p>Grade\u2019s project is proudly lo-fi. Its 1:1 recreation of a living hemlock was made the old-fashioned way. Instead of using digital tools, Grade and his team preferred to make their mould by scaling the tree themselves to apply plaster.<\/p>\n<p>Passers-by were welcome to drop by the MadArt studio in Seattle to stitch handcrafted blocks together over their mould. When the mould was removed, it revealed a physical manifestation of our cultural obsession with pixels, building blocks, Lego,\u00a0<i>Minecraft<\/i>\u00a0and other virtual approximations of nature.<\/p>\n<p><i>Middle Fork<\/i>\u00a0is part of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/renwick.americanart.si.edu\/wonder\">Wonder<\/a>, an exhibition to celebrate the Renwick Gallery in Washington DC. The sculpture is both a salute to the gallery\u2019s reopening after a two-year renovation, and an evocation of how, even when we try to tread lightly over Earth, we can\u2019t resist a spot of weird tinkering. This hollow sculpture \u2013 so self-evidently natural, so glaringly artificial \u2013 might have been dragged fresh out of the uncanny valley.<\/p>\n<p>And in a way, it was: after the exhibition, Grade\u2019s sculpture will be laid to rot beside its original, next to the Middle Fork Snoqualmie river \u2013 in an area of Washington state made famous by\u00a0<i>Twin Peaks<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>for New Scientist, 27 January 2016 SEATTLE artist\u00a0John Grade\u00a0makes much of his ecological credentials when discussing\u00a0Middle Fork\u00a0\u2013 his 500,000-piece wooden sculpture of a 150-year-old giant hemlock. No trees were felled or harmed in its making, he says, although someone must &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=1519\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[616,78],"tags":[315,263],"class_list":["post-1519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-reviews-and-opinion","tag-exhibition","tag-sculpture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1519"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1519\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2906,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1519\/revisions\/2906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}