Note: this show is over, but some of the pieces are still available on my Ready to Ship page

For the month of September 2024, my good friend, sculptor and furniture maker Kevin Reiswig and I will be showing new works of wood sculpture at Bainbridge Arts and Crafts gallery on Bainbridge Island. I hope you have the chance to see it.

TREEisms
2 person show with Kevin Reiswig
September 6-29, 2024
Bainbridge Arts and Crafts

These new works draw from countless hours observing wild trees in the forest, decades of shaping trees through pruning, and over 50 years of combined professional woodworking experience between the two artists. Reiswig and Rolland playfully transform branches into sculptural objects and old wood back into branches to create a bizarre forest of enticing objects which calls us to take a fresh look at familiar forms.

As a lifelong forest wanderer and woodworker, I’ve long sought to create a connection with nature in my work.  Using squared boards of wood as my material, I have cut, bent, carved, and shaped it into expressive, sculptural pieces.  In this body of work, I’ve started at the source, using windfallen or pruned branches that already have their history expressed in their form.  Selecting the branch I want to collaborate with is one of the most significant moments in my process.  The branch I find is never the one I sketched, and my idea evolves in response.

Many of my pieces focus on the strong, beautiful joints that trees effortlessly produce in endless variety. Drawing on my skills in grafting and training fruit trees, I join multiple parts from the same tree into a curious whole, both treeish and not.

In other pieces, I accentuate the uniqueness of each branch by selectively removing wood to emphasize what remains. Often, I highlight Madrona cankers – dark, crusty fungal wounds that are both strangely beautiful and the first signs of a living tree’s transition to soil.

It is easy to overlook the perfection of each leaf or branch when there are so many in every tree and forest.  Typically, it takes something unusual to remind us of the perfection of nature’s forms. Through small interventions, I transform these natural branches into improbable objects, celebrating the wonder and near impossibility of nature.