Tree Shaping, Living Art, Arborsculpture, Pooktre -- the process of shaping the trunks of trees and other woody plants produces remarkable works of art, often as practical as they are beautiful, and a result of many years of patience. Photos and commentary from practitioners, historical and contemporary.
We don't use Arborsculpture techniques
Hi,
This is Becky from Pooktre.
There is a misunderstanding. Our trees are not arbor sculpture they are shaped trees. There are many different people around the world who shape trees and all of them have they own name for what they do.
Richard has been really important as a focus point for the art form but he does not know how or why trees do what they do. He is on the path but he still hasn’t grown an balanced piece. Richard has said in his own book that all his trees are experiments. Which means he has been unable to recreate his own work. Another thing is, we believe that the way Richard shapes trees is too damaging and leads to unpredictable results. Which is the reason that we don’t wish to have our work confused with arbor sculpture.
We evolved our techniques of shaping trees in complete isolation from the rest of the world. With our techniques we know what will work or not and we can reproduce any of our pieces. Which we have done with our favorites. Pooktre only relates to our techniques, in short we have mastered the art of Pooktre.
We were invited to be the featured artists at the Growing Village World Expo 2005 in Aichi Japan. When in Japan we were told that arbor sculpture does not translate. In Japanese it means to crave away, not shape. At earlier time Richard had grown some trees in Japan which hadn’t worked out that well. We were asked if we wish to have the whole art form called Pooktre or Circus Trees. We felt that as Axel N. Erlandson had done his trees first and well, that we where happy to have our trees associated with his. So in Japan at the Expo the trees were call Circus trees. We are quite happy to have our trees associated with people that have masted their art. Example Krubsack who grow a chair on his first try or with Chis Cattle who has masted that way he shapes the trees and is able to reproduce the same design again and again. Which means he has a understanding of how and why the design works.
Becky