The Giving Tree

One tree, given three lives: as sculpture, as a print edition, and as the seed of a generative artwork. Created for the art program of LionTree's 2026 retreat.

Rebuild an aspen vertically — its trunk sliced into cross-sections, stacked with translucent spacers and lit from within — and let the same wood speak on paper: the end grain hand-inked and pulled as an edition of impressions, each one a fingerprint of the tree's rings.

I led the piece — the sculptural design, the fabrication and lighting, and the printmaking program alongside it.

The sculpture stood roughly fifteen to eighteen feet: alternating aspen slices and translucent structural spacers with programmable light running through the core. In parallel, the aspen sections were inked by hand and printed — an edition of around two hundred impressions on archival Japanese paper, foil-stamped and finished. The prints were then scanned at high resolution and became the source material for Sun Dog.

A single tree became a sculpture, an edition of prints, and the training material for a generative artwork — one continuous chain from living wood to moving image.