Any child fortunate sufficient to attend the center faculty in Port Townsend, Wash., will uncover its well-tended orchard of 70 fruit timber, which is there because of Seth Rolland, a furnishings maker and sculptor on the town. Rolland, who describes himself as “a lifelong forest wanderer,” has lived in New York, New Mexico, and, since 2001, in Port Townsend, and he has planted, pruned, and grafted timber all alongside the best way. Most of his woodwork entails planks of dried timber bought at a lumberyard and assembled in a trend supposed to thrill the consumer (whereas additionally dazzling the attention). However for a current exhibition, he created a variety of sculptures—treeisms, he calls them—made with trimmings and fallen branches from native timber.
A passionate observer in addition to a young of timber, Rolland notes that “in woodworking there’s lots of give attention to joinery, however timber do joinery with extra energy and wonder than we ever might.” In linking branches for these items, rigorously matching diameters and chopping largely scarf joints, he made his personal joinery as delicate as potential so the main focus would fall on the tree’s dramatic joints. “My concept was to make one thing that appeared prefer it might need grown naturally—in an alternate universe.”
—Jonathan Binzen
Images: Myron Gauger
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