Tree of Life III and Tree of Life IV. Ono Gallery, Tokyo 2005

Tree of Life III

Tree of Life III is an installation sculpture that I created remembering my former patients whom I cared for over many years working in hospitals as a nurse in New York. Through the details of my work, which took a very long period over many months; which by the way was important for me to take time to make; I wanted the spirits of my now-mostly-passed-away patients to shine through the shimmering beads and possibly through the colorful and delicate medical paraphernalia that I collected for years while on the job. There are materials like small plastic caps and connection pieces from various medicine bottles, intravenous sets, and injection needles. The process of their imagined life journey is illuminated by pages of text that I wrapped around certain branches of the tree-formed sculpture.

For one to walk through life, there are bound to be obstacles and issues, including sickness of body, mind and soul. I desire my sculpture to serve as a reference on one level to the lymphatic system as a part of immune system depicted here, which plays a major role in defending and healing of our real physical situations. On another level my work offers a metaphor for the vulnerability that one experiences during the life time as a long journey, and questions how one reaches out for an access for help.

Tree of Life IV

Many of my works are about the process of transformation. While natural processes generally follow repetitious tendencies, there is simultaneously the chaotic or random moment, which is also part of the natural process, from cellular division to the expansion of the universe. My interest in the complexity of life processes stems from my own limited comprehension of the unpredictable.

A few years ago I traveled to Jerusalem and encountered a huge and ancient olive tree with twisted and knotted branches, which obviously gave evidence of the severity of its natural conditions and persistence in the face of mortality. Then this wooden sculptural installation was born as an abstract form of an organically rooting and branching tree.

It was important for me to give this sculpture the sense of a circulating and intertwining form, as well as its multiple voids, which I cut out of the wood in reference to its natural processes of shedding and recreating of its seeds and leaves. I wanted the sculpture to embody energy in some way and become manifested in the wheel-like form at the nodal point from which the branches stretch out into their space. Like trees, we continue the nurturing process to fulfill our basic necessities and to reach out with our dreams throughout our journey of life.