Ash - Gimli - 29"

Why this one exists

Pure sculpture, from the flame series, and the largest piece of the Gimli ash: the tree that spent its entire life standing beside my family's fire pit on the shoreline. It watched a thousand fires. Now it is one. The series is inspired by a very particular hour, long after midnight, when the conversation has died down, everyone else has drifted inside, and you are alone staring into the coals. That is the feeling I carve toward. It is made to be touched, and its silhouette changes completely from every angle you take it in; the shorter tongues and the longer tongues of flame tell different stories, the way a real fire never repeats itself. Twenty-nine inches of a tree I knew personally.

It stood here

My brother and sister-in-law's place on the shoreline at Gimli, right beside the fire pit. In my archive there is a photograph of the sunrise over the lake: that is the sunrise this tree saw every single morning of its existence, and it belongs on this page. The ash came down in 2023 and became seven vases and this, its biggest piece, carved into the very thing it stood beside all its life.

Every side of it