Carbon Key:
The Forest Embodied
An ancient essential climate lock for our Global habitat
I sculpted Carbon Key intuitively, starting in January with a rough sketch. Along the way, symbolic elements surfaced and I began to understand the greater meaning and purpose of the piece.
I was born and continue to grow up in the Inland Temperate Rainforest, part of the Taiga, a massive forest that wraps around the northern part of the globe. It’s green and seemingly endless. When I build sculpture, I try to do so with purpose. Last Fall while out mushroom picking, I remembered that, due to evolution, there is an authentic order to things; the magic of the places that mankind has never touched.
If you look to the bottom of Carbon Key, you see the beginning of life, but it also could be considered the ending. A fruiting body has fallen to the forest floor and sprouted.
I often use weld dots as a way of animating connections within my sculptures. With Carbon Key, I wanted to tell the visual story of how trees and mushrooms communicate underground, sending nutrients and information, as well as linking in the visual concept of photosynthesis as I interpreted it.
If you follow the fractal patterns up the face of the sculpture, golden balls lead the way through the many layers of the forest. The understory is comprised of shrubs and small trees, and the crowns of the larger trees reach up to collect most of the sun’s energy. In the tropical rainforest, there is also an emergent layer of a few massive trees that tower over the canopy.
A lot of my composition lately is influenced by old botanical illustrations in the way that they encompass all of the stages of a plant’s life cycle. I try to do that, as well, when I invent my species. I started with a lichen-type shaped leaf matrix to hold all the elements of a forest. I wanted to create a three dimensional tapestry; a storyline of life in the woods .
I’ve come to understand that a forest can mean a lot of different things to different people; logs, a job, a habitat, exercise ground, foraging opportunities, inspiration. It not only produces oxygen but it stores carbon, and whenever we harvest resources, we release that carbon.
I realize that it’s easy to be overwhelmed when we are facing climate change and action. I feel it myself. I decided that instead of feeling helpless, I could use my voice, superpowers, and opportunity to help us remember how important our Old Growth and greater habitat are. When we tame all the forest into a mono crop farm, it’s good for industry but we forever remove the diverse wildness and the connected beauty that it holds.
It’s time, as the experts suggest, to halt worldwide destruction of the Old Growth. Focus on utilizing the landscape that has effectively already been converted into a massive tree farm. Value our resources beyond their worth as a raw product for export. Evolve our ideas around resource extraction and save what is left of the ancient world we felt the need to conquer when we arrive here. Pando, the Earth’s largest living organism, a quaking aspen, is around 8000 years old. The Redwoods live for thousands of years. Humans, if we are lucky, live to around one hundred these days. Consider if we tried to bring the giants back as some are working on by cloning them. How many generations of your children’s children would it take for those Sequoia to be gigantic again? Irreplaceable should equal priceless and therefore precious and worth saving. Maybe, in the way that we prize human artifacts, we could again value the forests that are nature’s living version.
Carbon Key
Kate Tupper
2020
9’ tall x 3.5’ wide x 3.5’ deep
Mild steel, 1/8” plate, 22 gauge sheet metal, hot rolled round, wire, weld, and paint
Photos: Lee Orr www.leeorr.com