Today, I’d like to share some of the symbolic details involved in creating my tree sculpture. The sculpture was made as a combined class project for two courses I took at Utah Tech University. For my project, I wanted to do something creative related to a poem I wrote about my grandfather called “The Perfect Color.” I also had to find a way to incorporate the historical aspects of language into my sculpture, as well as the course theme (Living, dying, and living again). With those considerations in mind, I began looking for ideas and decided that a paper mâché book sculpture would be the best way to include everything. I found a video of an artist creating a paper mâché tree, and I fell in love with her idea, but I didn’t think her process would work for what I visualized creating. I decided to use some of the supplies used in her tutorial but took a very different approach to my own project.

Trees are perpetually living, dying, and living again and through every season they endure. When death finally does come, trees are brought back to life through the things we create, whether it be furniture, books, or various other items, and even a paper mâché sculpture is made from the pulp of a tree. In this way, by creating a book sculpture, I intended to not only bring the tree back to life but also the memory of my grandfather. I formed seven branches to represent all the decades of my grandfather’s life, and since seven is also known as the perfect number, it also represents the title of my poem, The Perfect Color.

I also used seventy-one colored runes cut into shapes of leaves to represent the historical aspects of language. With all the runes combined, they symbolize the age of my grandfather’s death and represent all the colors I mentioned in my poem. The cover of the book I used for the sculpture’s foundation is blue and represents my grandfather’s lifelong view since he was in the Navy and lived near the ocean. I felt it was also important to add a folded flag to commemorate his death and a newspaper showing a glimpse of what happened during his lifetime. I affixed a picture of my grandfather’s grave to the underside of the tree, which I believe beautifully symbolizes the new life that is born of our bodies after we die. Specifically, for the language aspect of the project, language can also live, die, and live again as it transforms over time. In this way, a language that may one day die has a better chance of being remembered through this visual representation. In all these ways, I believe my sculpture appropriately captures all the aspects that I felt were important to illustrate in this final project.

Now that I’ve fallen in love with the process of paper sculpting, I’ve decided to continue doing more of these. Fortunately, paper mâché is inexpensive, and although time-consuming, it isn’t that difficult if you have enough patience to wait for the layers to dry. I could even see myself creating more to sell at an art fair. I know they’d be difficult to part with because even this one feels priceless to me, but I could see myself doing commissions for others if someone wanted to pay me enough for my time. Now, I’m just excited to see where my imagination takes me with the next one. I may do one last post on my tree sculpture just so that anyone who’s interested in trying to make one can get a better idea of the physical process of creating one for themselves. I hope you’ve enjoyed learning a little bit about my thought process while creating this sculpture. Please follow along if you’re interested in seeing more of my work in the future. Thanks for reading. Love you guys, ~Ellie xoxo