Tree rings are like time machines. They tell ancient stories about the Earth and climate, marking wet and dry years and periods of growth. Artist Tiffany Schlein and her husband, roboticist Ken Goldberg, decided they had found the perfect canvas for a body of work exploring the relationship between art and science in nature.
Together they collected giant cross-sections of already-cut trees from landfills and used them to create a series of tree-ring sculptures, carving inscriptions into the wood: notes on the human quest for knowledge and historical timelines going back thousands of years.
These sculptures are featured in an exhibition they organized for the Getty Museum's Art and Science Collide program, titled "Ancient Wisdom for Future Ecology: Trees, Time, and Technology."
One of the most intriguing works in the exhibition is called "Abstract Expression," a giant mahogany slab depicting a series of 39 equations that can be used to trace the progress of math from
Pythagoras to
Chata Gpt.
The timeline on the mahogany is shaped like a golden spiral, a mathematical ratio often found in natural structures such as the nautilus shell and associated with great beauty.
The properties of the golden spiral and the golden ratio on which it is based have been discussed by the greatest mathematical minds of all time, from Pythagoras and
Euclid in
Ancient Greece to modern scientists such as Oxford physicist
Roger Penrose.
Photo: nautil.us
Schlein and Goldberg say they wanted to pursue the idea that both art and math are abstractions - ways of describing the natural world without using language.
"These symbols can say so much and so succinctly without any words," Goldberg says. "They are like art in that they convey meaning in visual form. It's a language, but a different language, not text."
The shape of the salvaged redwood used in Abstract Expression helped Schlein and Goldberg determine what to inscribe on it. They were studying the piece - the largest they had collected - when they noticed something. "It had sharp edges that none of the other rings of wood in the exhibit had," Schlein says.
It seemed to the artists that the uneven angles of the tree, created through the process of preservation, echoed the basics of
mathematics. They started thinking about geometry and straight line math. Over 2,000 years ago, the Greek mathematician Euclid traced the most basic relationships of shapes, lines, and figures in two dimensions.
Photo: nautil.us
"The shape of the tree ring, derived from salvaged wood, became the basis for our thinking about the piece," says Schlein.
The artists have left room to add new dates to the timeline on the outer edges of the tree's annual rings, a hint of humanity's uncertain future. "These trees live in a deep past that we don't know," says Schlein, "and they will live in the distant future.
The exhibition runs through March 2 at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles before moving to the Di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in the San Francisco Bay Area.