Tendrils, tusks and thorns
Unlike working with milled wood, each madrona branch has its uniquely odd angles and curves. This means you can’t design something, then make it from predictable stock. But it also means that you have available wood configured in ways that you not only wouldn’t think to make but would be, if not impossible, surely impractical to create even if you did imagine it.
Their wild undulations are fertile ground for imagination, and for extending with predictable materials. I use copper tubing of varying diameters to add sinuous lines that undulate and swirl around the composite branch form. It also allows me to introduce landscape elements of water, wind, or growth like vines or kelp.
-sq-big%20web_edite.png)
-big%20web_edited_edited.png)
These tendrils are inspired by living things in watery realms like kelp, octopuses and jellyfish. They whirl about each other and the branch forms, never touching. Which for me adds a sense of self-awareness—even intelligence—as if they know where their other parts are. Again, octopus-like, with their brain in each arm.
I think of the pods at the end of some of the tendrils as perhaps a combination of sensors and loci of intelligence, especially given that most of these creatures don’t have heads.
Besides the sea life, I’m drawn to insect forms, which are a big influence on the shorter, spikier additions. And of course plant life has its many permutations of thorns.
The animal kingdom inspires the thorns that may be tusks, and the antler-like branches.
-big%20web_edite.png)