John Grade

JOHN GRADE: Hi, I’m John Grade. I’m an artist based in Seattle, and I’m at the Renwick, and we’re in the middle of installing a new sculpture called “Middle Fork.” It’s part of the exhibition WONDER. When I was conceiving “Middle Fork,” I was most aware of the historical quality of the building and wanted to think about a sense of time passing, so I was fortunate enough to find a very large old-growth tree that was roughly the same age as the building.

There were three layers of the creation of the project that were most important to me. Initially, it was the experience of casting a live tree and getting to rig up eighty feet into this tree and getting to experience it intimately, then getting to try to communicate what that experience was like to group of hundreds of people that participated and volunteered their time to help create the sculpture, then finally to the larger group of people that are going to come to the Renwick and experience this sculpture in this immersive context.

The sculpture is made with cedar that was salvaged from an old bridge. It’s old growth, and it’s been milled in the studio and then applied by hundreds of people in its current form. We estimate there are somewhere around 4 or 500,000 uniquely shaped pieces. It’s a very interactive creation process. I hope that some of that is then transferred to the interactive quality of the moving in and through the lens for the people that come and experience it at the Renwick.