We live in a time of meaning crisis, a time of increasingly disconnected culture from reverence and purpose. It's not only a felt sense growing within ourselves, but also a glaring reality in the landscapes around us. We live in Northern California, where the deeply connected relationship with the forest has been lost for over a century. Our intention is to find ways to rebuild this relationship.

This project is an experiment intended to bridge the gap between tending the forest and the creative act. It is aimed at finding new motivations for relating to our landscape with more than just an obligatory tending, but an engagement in the opportunity to create meaningful experiences together and explore the mythic connections to this relationship: turning forest management into art and ritual.

A large-scale sculpture will simultaneously serve as a collaborative process and a reflective experience, in which our efforts to thin and tend a historically overharvested, mis-managed forest are a direct contribution to the material needed to build the sculpture, creating a playful but deeply connected representation of who we are in relationship to place.

This project is hoping to inspire the threads of weaving our community into a more resilient future. The sculpture will remain throughout the year as a touchstone and gathering landmark for general interactivity and continued creativity through forest stewardship. It will be open to creative additions by anyone participating in our social forestry series throughout 2024, which will bring in support from guest practitioners with traditional ecological knowledge.

As the final part of this community ritual creation the intention is to burn the sculpture, reflecting the full process of forest stewardship practices while fulfilling a climactic and symbolic arc to the mythos of the project.