(C) U.S. State Dept
This story was originally published by U.S. State Dept and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
John Grade for U.S. Embassy Guatemala – U.S. Department of State [1]
[]
Date: 2024-09
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my most vivid memory of Guatemala is the
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Sea of trees in the paton in the north
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of Guatemala this
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series of ridges going out onto the horizon line. So I
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knew when the art and embassies program contacted
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me that I would want to make a sculpture that related to those
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trees and I settled on an individual type of
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tree a ceiba.
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I was interested in the ceiba tree initially because it
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was the national tree of Guatemala, but it was
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also the tree that drew me in when I was in the jungle. It
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was either the tallest tree or the widest and
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largest tree but it was also formally really
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beautiful the way in which these lumbering
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limbs moved out into space and and
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then brought you into investigate its
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bark and the surface of the bark was very different
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if it was a juvenile where these spikes were
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very large relative to the volume of the trunk and then
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as the tree grew you just sort of see these little vestigial
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knobs on it surface and they
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would play with light in these beautiful shadows.
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Carolina Rosales de Zea is the director
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of the botanical gardens in Guatemala City and
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she is, beyond being a lovely person was an amazing
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resource in trying to find the right Ceiba tree
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to base the sculpture on Carolina helped
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connect me with a family just near Antigua
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In Guatemala and they had this spectacular
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save a tree which is the tree that I ultimately ended up
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using as the inspiration for the sculpture.
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Carolina along with a couple of associates helped me to scan the tree.
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It was a rather elaborate process and also through this
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process. I got to meet some of the family in particular
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a brother and sister that have been the most recent caretakers of
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the tree and learned a lot about the trees
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biology both from them and as well from Carolina.
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Juxtaposing, the Guatemalan experience which was so
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social and collaborative in terms of finding that tree. I set
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out in the Great Basin in Nevada in
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the United States to find a Bristlecone Pine. It was a very
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solitary endeavor and it was high
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altitude. I was at 11,000 feet
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when I found this tree and it took me a lot of time and I
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did it actually with plaster casts.
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While the Ceiba is a much larger tree three, maybe
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400 years old. The Bristlecone Pine
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is much smaller, but three or four thousand years old.
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So they’re very different types of trees, but formally
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when brought together and adjusted for scale, I
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think they’re very convincingly read as one specific tree.
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To fabricate the sculpture the larger
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planes of the sculpture where individual pieces
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fit together were very carefully calibrated.
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But what happened within each of those frames
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was much more left within the purview
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of the person creating that such that
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they could have aesthetic influence. So if they were on
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the seabus side, you would see some of the the spiky quality
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or for me almost like waves that
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you saw in that sea of trees. And if
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you’re on the bristlecones side, there were burles that sort
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of bulged out from the surface that were something that
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people could riff upon and so we also began with
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a hologram of the sculpture so
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that we could see it in scale move around it adjust its
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scale and then moved into a much
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more sort of old school armature of building the sculpture
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so that we could do it in a reductive way.
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So you would over build some of these pieces and then carve away
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that negative space to get what you
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To install the sculpture. We erected a scaffold
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so that we could actually be building the base of the
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sculpture which is also on the plane of
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the staircase. So when you approach the sculpture
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through the staircase and you’re standing at its Landing you’re standing
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at the imaginary ground plane of where this tree will
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be but you’re 20 feet off the ground. So when we finished
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installing the sculpture that scaffold disappears and it
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floats
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We also had 60 feet above the
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sculpture in which we had to tie cables into the ceiling to
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support it. And because this is such an
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active seismic zone we have horizontal cables, which brace
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the sculpture in the big size.
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It was really satisfying to work with Miller Hull because
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they were early enough in the design process with the
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architecture that they were able to respond to some
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of the decision-making in the sculpture. Primarily the
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fact that there’s a three foot Gap through the sculpture so
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that that three foot Gap actually continues in
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through the building in the architecture.
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prizes for me
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In seeing the sculpture actually installed in the embassy was getting
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this Vantage from above. I mean, we’re given
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so many different advantages through this beautiful architecture
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that feels so integrated. And another
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thing that I think really stands out for me is how
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activated that three foot Gap
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is between the two halves of the sculpture. It’s it’s a
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kind of a sense of a boundary but on the
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other hand because it isn’t actually anything existing
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in space. I think it nicely Echoes
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the fact that we create artificial constructs
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between people between countries
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and that when we look more closely. Yes,
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they’re all these little differences. But ultimately there’s this
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real sense of a kind of unified whole
[END]
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