Untitled is composed of an unusual, sphere-shaped maple burl (a tumor-like growth on a tree) that Jennifer Pastor found near the Northern California-Oregon border. Pastor worked closely with an expert logger, who sliced the 600-pound burl in half to form two thin hollow basins. The sculpture’s half-inch-thick walls both push the structural limits of the material and reveal the entangled pattern and compression of time in the wood. Untitled reflects Pastor’s interest in contorting “natural” forms, engaging with what she describes as “the awareness that objects make us as part of the same process by which we make them.”
