Lindsay Maizland

Published on American Word Magazine’s website. Spring 2016.

With towering rainbows made of thousands of thin strings, mountains comprised of stacked index cards, and rolling hills built with old tires, the Renwick Gallery’s WONDER exhibit challenges visitors to let their imaginations take over and see ordinary objects in a completely new way.

Artist John Grade’s “Middle Fork,” a horizontally-suspended hollow tree sculpture, is no exception. The roughly 45-foot piece is made of hundreds of thousands of tiny repurposed cedar blocks, each the size of a person’s thumb. Visitors squeeze between the sculpture and the gallery’s walls to get a view of the tree from all angles, looking through the bottom root flare and ducking beneath the branches. But what makes the sculpture even more awe-inspiring is that it is an exact replica of a living, 140-year-old western hemlock tree that currently stands near the middle fork of the Snoqualmie River in Washington.

“I think it’s really incredible to think of the tree standing in the woods and it’s solid… but here you can look inside and really investigate the structure,” said Gregory Huse, the main speaker in a Renwick gallery talk last Wednesday.