杏吧原创

SEATTLE artist makes much of his ecological credentials when discussing Middle Fork 鈥� 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.

Grade鈥檚 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.

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, Minecraft and other virtual approximations of nature.

Middle Fork is part of , an exhibition to celebrate the Renwick Gallery in Washington DC. The sculpture is both a salute to the gallery鈥檚 reopening after a two-year renovation, and an evocation of how, even when we try to tread lightly over Earth, we can鈥檛 resist a spot of weird tinkering. This hollow sculpture 鈥� so self-evidently natural, so glaringly artificial 鈥� might have been dragged fresh out of the uncanny valley.

And in a way, it was: after the exhibition, Grade鈥檚 sculpture will be laid to rot beside its original, next to the Middle Fork Snoqualmie river 鈥� in an area of Washington state made famous by Twin Peaks.

This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淏rickwork hemlock鈥�