Hinoki

This is a huge fallen tree trunk, but it is not a real log. It is a sculpture carved from cypress wood, and it is made up of three separate pieces. Together they stretch about seven and a half metres, or twenty-five feet, so the work fills a good part of the room. The largest piece stands about 170 centimetres tall, around five and a half feet. The trunk lies on its side, hollow and weathered, as if it had dropped in a field long ago and been left there. Walk along its length and take it in slowly.

Charles Ray spotted a fallen tree in a meadow beside a California highway and became fixed on that one log. He had it cut apart with a chainsaw and carried to his Los Angeles studio. There, silicone molds were taken and a fiberglass copy was built. The copy went to Osaka, Japan, where the master woodworker Yuboku Mukoyoshi and his apprentices carved it in hinoki, which is Japanese cypress. Ray chose them because their tradition is to copy things that can no longer be restored. When an old temple or Buddha cannot be maintained, it is simply remade. The carving began on the inside and worked outward.

Ray wanted the sculpture to have breath, or life. He decided that life could come from the act of carving itself, working from the inside out. He found it hard to finish the piece and let it go. Then he asked Mr. Mukoyoshi how the wood would age. The answer was that it would be fine for 400 years, then enter a crisis of splitting and cracking for two hundred years, then decline slowly for another 400. Ray realized the wood, like the original log, had a life of its own. Look closely at the surface and imagine it slowly changing.