My Turn

My partner and I close on the purchase of our first house in less than a week. This means I will have my own studio for the first time! I’ve been having fun shopping for new equipment and planning my new space, which will be in the garage. The electricity in the garage is insufficient, so I am having an electrician install a new panel and a bunch of outlets. A friend of mine and I will frame one wall and install windows and a room air conditioner.

Besides working on my studio, I will also be laying new flooring in the house and repairing walls and painting and doing maintenance on the roof, so it may be a month or two before I actually return to turning full-time. In the meantime, I can still work in my current studio—whenever I’m not working on the house or packing and moving our stuff.

I will try to keep you up on the progress of my studio. I have been avoiding blogging because this has been the most stressful month I can remember in years! Besides, I’ve barely had time to turn. But very soon I’ll have something to blog about again.

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, last month I prepared (and gave) a talk for the docents of the Tucson Museum of Art, on woodturning as an artform. Besides giving a brief history of artistic turning, I described the basic anatomy of trees and discussed some of the characteristics of wood and the vessel form.

Thinking about the anatomy of a tree unsettled me this time around. Trees are living organisms; that wood was once alive, I feel, makes it unlike other media (except maybe basket materials). But the heartwood that woodworkers so value is dead wood. Heartwood is formed as a tree’s cells die; the life of a tree is all in those layers between the heartwood and the bark.

Heartwood, dead wood; a living organism dead at its center. The image has been stuck in my mind like a sand grain in my shoe.

Today, my perspective shifted. It occurred to me that heartwood is the tree’s past. It “lives” in the tree as our past—also dead, having literally passed—lives in us. Our history forms our structure, storing molecular bits of ourselves, recording cycles of abundance and privation, unseasonable frosts, long summers, lightning strikes, patterns of growth. Like trees, we become who we are as each old layer dies, as each new layer forms.

We live in the layers between our past and the (also dead) outer bark that protects us.