The first conceptual underpinnings of the seed that grew into WAKE, and my first real artistic breakthrough as an MFA student, happened when I was working on a project titled Tree of Life. The reason why I call it a breakthrough was because Tree of Life came into being as I was deeply reflecting on who I was as an artist and came to the realization that the art I’ve been producing were all superficial and lacked meaning.

It started as I was sitting underneath the Century Tree, perhaps the largest and oldest tree on the Texas A&M campus. It’s quite beautiful; there is a whole side of the tree that has branches so big and long that they’ve curved to the ground and created a sort of canopy. A well-known superstition states that a couple passing under the Century Tree will be together for life but, on the flip side, a person walking beneath the tree by themselves is doomed to be forever alone. As a graduate student and a “2-percenter”, I really didn’t care. I just wanted to get in touch with nature and thought that sitting under the tree would help me figure out what direction I wanted to take my next project.

Oddly enough, it did help. I was thinking about what was important to me, not in art, but in life, and found that it was memories. People’s experiences and life stories shape who they are, and it gives me a lot of gratitude to know that, appreciating and understanding the diversity of every person through everything that happened to shape their life.

I was inspired to create a visual representation of the layer of experiences in a human life that gets stacked on top of each other chronologically much like growth rings on a tree. Here is a link to document my progress on the sculpture I made on a separate blog.