Reliquary
In the summer of 2019, I went to the Klode Park in Whitefish Bay where I saw piles of driftwood scattered along the beach. Somewhere, I imagined, a tree had gone to pieces, maybe a red oak from erosion or a hemlock from violent storms, swept into the lake. With 1,600 miles of shoreline, Lake Michigan swallows many trees. They float alligator-like for years until wind and tide roll them ashore. My driftwood floated, bobbed, and found its final resting place on the Milwaukee shore. By then, the tree had been smashed and stripped naked of bark after a life of sea-tossed wandering. Stark and desolate now, some pieces covered by sand and debris, they lay broken and bent but stunning in their pure twisted form.
I was Intrigued by their odd shapes and by the affiliation between tree and water. So I brought a bundle back to the studio. Holding it one at a time in my hands, examining its surface, noticing the hollow holes and the scars that the water made, and the bent shapes that looked like broken limbs, I felt connected to the history of wood, to the life of an unknown tree that once flourished in the soil somewhere in full being, but now prone and weathered and in pieces. One by one, I examined and cleaned them, as if preparing each piece for a funeral. I began to wrap them with handmade paper coils as a gesture of putting their skin back on. Paper I use comes from the branches of mulberry trees, so it felt as though I was returning the fragment back to its rightful owner. In Korea, between the 16th and the 19th century, people made paper garments to clothe the dead. According to Jeon Yangbae, a well-known Korean paper garment designer, paper is the ideal material for either cremation or burial due to its combustibility and biodegradability.
As I paper-wrapped the driftwood in my studio, it seemed as if these fragments were revealing their life stories, their journey in this life. This installation is my effort to honor the trees they once were.