@Jack B Tomlinison Park
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Please note: this piece was lost due to heavy vandalism.
Jack B. Tomlinson Park is seated firmly in my daily routine. I walk my dog, Luna, around the lake one time, clockwise, each morning at 8am, with slight variations based on the weather or the bloom of the trees. Luna and I have taken this route since moving to Arvada five years ago. For this place that is so rooted into my present life, I wanted to create a sculpture that was strange, hidden, and curiosity-spiking.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I started playing with ideas of protection. I was in lockdown, like the rest of the country, watching the long-neglected cracks in our societal and political structures splinter under the weight of the crisis. I felt this urge to hastily put a bubble around all that was good and comfortable and known; everything else was so unbearably scary.
As time went on, I noticed these protections were being hastily built around all sorts of things. As a society, we rushed to shoddily tack layers of protection over our established and deeply broken systems. As individuals, we formed well-intentioned defenses around routines and relationships that weren't working. We favor the known and so creatively safeguard the status quo without asking if the status quo is actually worth protecting. It gets to the point where the endless layers of defense transform into their own object, beautiful and haphazard and nebulous and strange, all protecting something hidden within that might already be dead.
I started experimenting with these little shields of protection in my studio in late March 2020. After a year of experimentation and materials tests, I settled on creating an organic, translucent shield for a piece of dead tree. The tree trunk enclosed inside is from The City of Arvada's tree graveyard--a pile of limbs and trunks from cottonwoods and oaks removed from local parks and public spaces. The trunk begins at the ground in one solid column before branching out into two mighty trunks, both severed right above their point of connection. The details of the dead wood inside are obscured and distorted by the meticulous layers of resin, creating strange surfaces and visual tricks.