I fill occasional gaps in the bark by hand, which gives an organic feeling to the machine aesthetic. Because I am layering identical patterns, and because the real world is imperfect, the bark does not wrap around the circumference of the underlying tree exactly. At the moment I am applying a bark layer which I laser cut out of cardboard using the same sequence of branch patterns. I stabilized it with wood glue and expandable foam.

I used this first collection of paper branches to build an underlying structure for my sculpture, like a naked tree. For this part -an arboreal vignette (and habitat for electric creatures of the Virginian night)- I designed a sculptural tree in Blender that I unwrapped, print, cut, and folded to make branches out of relatively thin paper. I continue to work on my latest Electrolier sculpture. Meanwhile my studio is a good portrayal of my current state of being: a lot happening all at once, incomplete, in need of a good clean-up, and full of promise. Of course, I want the end result to be beautiful, but I strive for a beauty that is multi-layered, honest, generous, and full of stories.ĭepending upon my recovery process, it may be a few weeks before I can continue with making sculpture. My art is more about the process of becoming -the struggle to achieve a difficult but worthy goal- than it is about the end result. However, I often find myself undertaking arduous and complex works because a big challenge yields so many little surprises, adaptations, and personal touches that don’t happen when you follow a direct path from concept to object.

Some people have commented that my approach is convoluted and I will not argue with that. Meanwhile, looking at the state of my studio, it appears that I have imposed my own condition on this tree branch -a work in-progress for my latest Electrolier. I’m getting ready to have arthroscopic surgery on my left hip to repair an old injury that is becoming arthritic.

Blender to pepakura