Zeder Monster Sculpture

JohnGardnerArt Artist Profile My sculptural work in wood explores the connection between my creative future and past experience. I express my love of nature, gardening, and landscaping through the use of found objects, natural and repurposed wood, particularly the branches, roots and trunks of trees. My work includes intaglio prints, abstract sculpture and semi-functional furniture, primarily tables and chairs. My emphasis on wild natural forms emerging from finished wood boards and beams is a metaphor for the creative artist emerging from the constrained finished life of a business manager. The tree connects us with the earth, the air and water. The miracles of photosynthesis and transpiration, the movement of life from the roots of a tree through the wood of the trunk and branches, complete the regeneration of life from the decaying wood that builds the soil. This transformation creates life, not possible without the tree, and I become part of the process through the creation of art. I am influenced by Asian art, growing Bonsai trees for twenty years, the work of George Nakashima, and the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, especially his affinity for Japanese art forms and his goal of grounding the inner space of the house into the outer space of the natural environment. I develop my work by responding to the wood, knowing the piece will change in the process. The final product reflects my responses to form and content, finding expression in space, but holding a place in time. I have studied the work of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973), a German-American historian and social philosopher, who taught at Harvard and Dartmouth College. He has been described as an “original thinker”, emphasizing that human history and experience should be studied using a new method based on human speech, as opposed to the purely objective academic methods of philosophy and theology. His ideas are complex and extensive, though not widely known. The Latin phrase, “Respondeo Etsi Mutabor”, which translates as “I respond although I will be changed”, is one of the keys to understanding his ideas. The following quote also gives incite into Rosenstock-Huessy’s thinking: “The history of the human race is written on a single theme: How does love become stronger than death? The composition is recomposed in each generation by those whose love overcomes murdering or dying. So history becomes a great song, Augustine’s Carmen Humanum.