A Tree in the Wood by Giuseppe Penone at Yorkshire Sculpture Park

The current exhibition in the Underground Gallery at Yorkshire Sculpture Park is A Tree in the Wood by Giuseppe Penone. The exhibition features works drawn from the past five decades of Penone’s career. 

Central to Perone's practice is humanity's relationship with the natural world, and his work addresses themes around the body, nature, time, touch and memory. Perone makes use of a variety of natural materials including stone, acacia thorns and laurel leaves. An ongoing motif throughout his work is the importance of trees to society.

 

One suggestion of this is through Matrice, which consists of a 30 metre long bisected trunk of a fir tree that has been laid horizontally and carefully carved to follow one of its growth rings. The trunk cuts through the separate rooms within the gallery so as to emphasise the shear size of the object and to reflect the way that the tree itself has been sliced and examined.

On the far wall in the final gallery space the artist has drawn around his finger and continued the lines off the paper and onto the gallery walls. Again, this references the growth rings on the tree.