REAL PEOPLE/DREAM WEAVER
Up Where He Belongs
Artist Jayson Fann turns fallen trees into spectacular ‘spirit nests’
A nest in progress and, bottom right, a completed one.
AS A KID, I spent a lot of time exploring the banks of the Platte River in Omaha, Nebraska. I’d ride my horse over there and drag home tree roots and pieces of driftwood. At age 9, I built a nest in my closet out of all that wood, and then I kept adding on. Eventually, the nest took over my whole room. You know in Where the Wild Things Are, when the little boy’s room gets transformed into a forest? I was like, That’s what I want my room to look like! And I’ve been building nests for humans ever since.
Now I call them spirit nests. You can sit in them. You can sleep in them. A lot of people ask me about the name. The words “spirit” and “nest” can mean different things to different people, but to me, a spirit nest is a place where you can go to connect with other people, or to connect with yourself, with your own soul. I’ve built these nests all over, including at museums, libraries and children’s hospitals. I think of each nest as a constellation of energy. It brings people together.
I make a lot of these works out of fallen eucalyptus trees. Eucalyptus, an invasive species in California, is particularly flammable, so clearing its debris is a step in reducing fire risk. I have probably repurposed several hundred of these trees.
After I sand down all the branches, I weave them together in a radial pattern. The challenge is finding where each branch wants to go. It’s like a puzzle. The trees grow in a spiral, shaped by the winds on the coast, and in a way, I’m weaving that wind, that history, into the piece. Once the limbs are in place, I screw the whole thing together at the points of connection—there might be 1,000 different points. It’s very much like the human body. You’ve got the bones, the muscles, the ligaments, the tissue. Everything is linked.
When you work with wood, you start to see all the beautiful and unique qualities that each species and each specimen has. How their grain and their shapes and their density reflect their lives over decades or centuries. Whatever it is I’m working on, I’m always looking to discover all the invisible forces that are connected to it. —As told to Marla Cimini
Jayson Fann, 50, is an artist, sculptor, musician and educator in Monterey, California.