‘You are the tree’: Redwood City exhibit incorporates local business byproducts into commentary

Using byproducts from more than 30 small business, Kent and Nanette created their sculpture over six months. Blue jeans, metal shavings, various food wastes — and Daily Journal newsprint — number among the appropriated raw materials used to create the tree. 

“This [tree], as a metaphor, represents so many things ... it’s a huge narrative,” Kent said.

While he and Nanette are separate artists with independent careers, they have collaborated on numerous occasions in the past. Still they admit they haven’t done anything quite like this before.

Self-described bookmakers and printmakers at heart, Kent and Nanette used this knowledge to aid in the sculpture’s production.

“It’s essentially a paper pulp project,” Kent said.

Transforming each of the raw materials separately into a liquid mixture, they used a mold and deckle to make pulp sheets. They then applied this to the trunk to make distinct and colorful sections of bark.

Small red flags fixed across the growth rings on the trunk’s surface mark different “disruptive innovation events” that have occurred in the last 400 years — the age of the tree. The first flag starts at 1620, which Kent and Nanette consider here to be the normalization of slavery in the United States. The flags continue and proliferate toward the edge to finally indicate the advent of the digital technologies and services of today — such as iPhones, media streaming, online shopping and ridesharing.

Also on the surface of the trunk is a triangular felt strip. It signifies the 5% of remaining coastal redwood forests today. The other 95% of redwoods were clearcut in the 19-century in only 50 years. The arresting visualization of this fact makes one wonder what it would mean to lose such a unique, immemorial and celebrated part of the landscape — living nexus to the past.

Redwood coastal trees represent a part of the California ecosystem, just as the aggregate labor of a local community represents an important ecosystem unto itself. So that’s why, apart from the context-specific aspects of the work, Nanette maintains that “the project goes beyond Redwood City. The tree ... still means the same thing.”

What it means to you, however, you can come and discover for yourself.

The exhibit has been extended two weeks through Sunday, March 22, at Courthouse Square. 'You are the Tree'  was commissioned by Fung Collaborative Projects in Collaboration with Redwood City Improvement Association for the Redwood City Art Kiosk. Go to preneo.org/youarethetree for more information.