Trees, sculpture and DNA

Carved Maple by Kelly McCarty

What do humans and trees have in common?  DNA, for one thing.  And while for humans, it may be true that beauty is only skin deep, for trees it is just the opposite - beauty lies beneath the bark.  I once lived on 40 acres of rural property North of Bellingham, Washington, in a house with two wood stoves and two chainsaws.  When you chop a couple cords of wood for winter, you quickly learn that the tree sections where the trunk splits into two branches represents the hardest wood to split, and those sections tend to get set aside.  As these sections accumulated I noticed that they had a definite appearance of a torso.  The really interesting thing was that they seemed to have clear gender associations as well - some were definitely female and others male, with a few trans-gender trees thrown in as well!  When carved these sections reveal some similar traits with their distant human cousins.  The outer layers of wood, over what would be the hips, were soft and fleshy.  As you carve inward, toward the base of what would be our lower spine, the wood becomes much harder and denser, and areas of complex grain structure correlate to areas of human biological complexity.   It is some of the easiest carving I’ve ever done, as the form truly fell out of the material.  What does this mean?  My guess, not being a genetic biologist, would be that there are snippets of DNA which are shared by both humans and trees, and that the information coding that instructs a tree to branch out is related to the coding that tells our cells to grow two legs out of one trunk.  The bottom line (pun intended) is that there is always much to learn from the process of creating art!

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