Hands down, this was the largest, most labor-intensive, and time-consuming job I’ve completed in 24 years. Also, the most gratifying.😊 “Awaken” took 7 months of work, 5 companies collaborating, and the kindest, most patient clients ever. The task was to bring the outside to the inside of an epic woodland sanctuary through a giant biophilic art installation at the main entrance.
I envisioned the concept in late January 2021. By March, 50 five-inch diameter birch trees were collected in Maine. They were cut into four foot lengths and delivered by freight to Ohio where they were cut even smaller into hundreds of half-round segments. Those segments were then sent to a vacuum kiln in Vermillion, where they spent almost 7 weeks drying slowly until their moisture content was reduced to single digits.
When the log segments were finally dry, they were driven back to Cleveland, where I mixed and matched them into columns, carefully spacing them by width and color. The goal was to reimagine the towering trunks in a way that allowed the darker bark to dance into rhythmic patterns within the composition.
Hundreds of nail brads later and lots of wood glue, these beauties were mounted to 20 different interlocking panels by the experts at @chmuracustom woodworks and carefully hung in late August, with precision that only the team at @andyrockfas could provide. Before we finished, I made sure to fulfill one final request for the client — their sweetheart initials were engraved with a heart on one of the logs.
