About This Piece

Look closely at a cut trunk and the grain tells the whole life of the tree — regular lines recording how it grew, how its girth thickened year by year. Then, here and there, a knot. The lines flow around it, pressing in, adding a new ring patiently every season.

Some knots are almost perfect circles, as if drawn with a compass. Others are disrupted, knocked off-true — and you sense something happened there, some injury in the growing. Each one is a kind of seal of life: wherever you see one, a branch once reached out, and the tree went on living around it.

That's why I see a mandala in it. A pattern of growth and survival, ordinary wood revealing its hidden order. My nature theme at its quietest.

Where did this knot come from — a forest, an old park? I'll let you wonder.

An original work. Signed.

Jolanta