Tree of Life

This is the only phrase I can think of for the tree I impressed to make. A sculpture if you will. Made using the prunings of a friend’s cherry tree. Many of these pruned twigs had almost a 90° bend in them, which enabled me to use them as the trunk of the tree, and have it free-standing.

Mk I was initially made from my prunings from the garden. Bits of cherry, almond, flowering redcurrant and blackcurrant. But these latter two also give off a nasty smell when handled, so having made a prototype, I set about making Mk II. First obstacle was convincing my father that the twigs lying on the garage floor weren’t there just because I was too lazy to break them up and put them in the compost bin. I really had been given them, and please stop trampling them.

I made Mk II over a couple of nights (sculptures usually happen in the winter when it’s not nice outside), and bound lots of twine round the stems to give it some semblance of plant stem/trunk. I then played around with some felt, and eventually settled on a leaf design, and then worked out how to attach the felt leaves to the branches.

Next were flowers. I struggled a lot with this. I couldn’t think what type of lowers would suit this type of tree sculpture. A friend gave me a couple of flower brooches and I attached these, but they didn’t look right.

Another friend felt inspired by the sculpture, and said it reminded her of the tree of life. This was at the Furnace, and we symbolised the tree of life, as described in Revelation, spanning the river of the water of life (using the silk waterfall as the river). This comes from Revelation 22:2 – on each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. This was during our time of preparation for taking the creativity to CLAN Gathering, and releasing it. The tree didn’t make it to CLAN, but it did make it to CLAN Women 2012. It was sited in the prayer room, and was festooned with a multitude of tissue flowers which seem so apt, and are still on it.

I’m considering making Mk III as the version which went to CLAN Women came back with some broken branches. I have some twigs left over from another creative project.