THE STORY BEHIND THE TREE

For my independent study project, I decided to try something new for me as an amature artist: a 6 foot tall tree sculpture. My inspiration was the Autograph Tree we visited in Coole Park that Yeats and other famous poets carved thier names into. The carvings almost seemed like time capsules, preserving the spirit of the reknown writers who once used the tree as a source of creativity.

That being said, I decided to make the tree out of as much recycled materials as possible because they can be re-used over and over again, like Yeats returned to Coole Park for years to awaken his creative energy. The base of the trunk is made out of a rusty hanging tomato plant holder that I found on the curb while running one morning. In order to make the branches, I used metal and plastic clothes hangers from my closet and connected them to the trunk by using a big plastic pretzel jug I took from work once it was empty (I work at a frozen yogurt shop). I completely covered the tomato plant holder trunk and clothes hanger branches with plastic water bottles and secured them with over 230 feet of wire in order to give the frame more substance and a bark-like texture. This was by no means a walk in the park and took the majority of the time I spent working on my autograph tree.  

Next, I had the idea to turn the tree into a lanturn so it could still be seen at night in the dark. To do this, I screwed a ceiling lighting fixture kit to the middle of wooden base my dad cut for me out of scrap wood we had in the garage. I didn't think one light at the base was bright enough, so I decided to add so roped LED lights towards the top of the structure near the start of the branches. Once the lighting fixtures were set in place, it was finally time to wrap the plastic and wire garbage pile with an assortment of paper products. Along with an entire gallon of glue, I used white, yellow, purple, blue, and orange tissue paper from my basement, super-strength napkins from work that I used to clean the ink off of stamps with (I also work at a fine paper store), and a paper that was used for packaging to cover the bottles and wire.

In order to transform this into an "autograph" tree, I used headlines from an Irish newspaper I kept from the trip, which also added relavent phrases and words about events that happened in Ireland while I was abroad, serving almost as an extention of my art journal. This represents the pervasive aspects of history and society on the Irish culture and how their affects become ingrained, or carved, into the people of the Ireland. I then ripped up some of the pages out of Irish literature notebook that incorporated the poetry and plays we discussed in our Irish literature class. Finally, the most important part, I painted everyone's signatures that I got on the last night of the trip onto the tree. Just like the real autograph tree had carvings of famous poets's names, my autograph tree had "carvings" of future famous writers' and artists' names, aka my fellow study abroad classmates, and they truely left their mark on my Irish experience. To wrap up the project, I sponged on a layer of gold paint, followed by a light dusting of light blue and white paints to add a nice finishing touch. And voilá, a 6-ft recycled metal, plastic, and paper personal autograph tree was created!