By: Jay Faulconer email
the contributor
Description: Created by Matthew Pyatt, Hannah Johnson, Joe Becker, Maddie Mickleborough, and Roger Asay as an independent study on festival based sculpture for Prescott College, located in Prescott, Arizona. We made the upside-down trees first by acquiring them from APS, they are Siberian Elm trees (invasive to Arizona and are often removed). We then processed the trees by peeling all their bark off and grinding them down to a smooth texture and white color, we repeated this step many times in order to get the fine, stick-like look. We applied a poly finish on them and lastly made sure we could stand them upside-down on their branches, sometimes adding on branches to help balance them out. The bigger tree in the center is a Palo Verde tree, made 25 years ago by our independent study mentor, Roger Asay. We had a lot of fun showing them off at Burning Man and heard a couple got married beneath them, a two hour interpretive dance was danced underneath them, and an erotic model photo shoot happened in them. We are looking forward to the next time we come back to Burning Man and perhaps show off the trees again!!
