This was a collaboration with my friend Joe. This maple tree was outside of the foundry where we both worked, and Joe spent most of his lunch breaks under and around this dying maple. Joe is pure – everything about him seems rooted and natural. It’s really frustrating sometimes; he’s one of the guys that you love because of their sincerity and giftedness but also hate them because they’re just so damn good at everything.

Anyway - Joe loved this tree. We took down a branch together that was on the dying half of the tree, cast it in bronze, and reattached it. No one except us and a few friends knew it was there. It was like a hidden gift.

We left the bronze raw so that it would patina naturally, and over the course of a couple years the bronze began to take the color tone of the tree itself. How about that.

In 2022 Joe discovered that a sign had been posted to the tree by the city saying that the tree was going to be taken down. We removed our bronze branch and are, as of me writing this, thinking through new places to reinstall the branch.