Carved Statues by Morgan Herrin

Morgan Herrin is an artist who carves incredible large scale statues out of wood using, as his choice of material, construction grade 2x4s that are bonded together. An article on him a few years ago provided some background:

While a graduate student at Ohio State University, he went to Rome, where he was surrounded by sculpture that looked like people, not abstractions. Until then, he’d worked with polystyrene foam, making pieces that resembled more permanent, solid materials. Since he was a carpenter, a transition to making figures from wood seemed natural enough.

His material is two-by-fours purchased from a hardware store or lumberyard. “It’s almost a growing thing depending on the conditions, and it kind of has a mind of its own,” Herrin muses. “Especially pine. It’s important to let that happen, to let the material do what it wants.”

I am, frankly, a little in the dark as to how his sculptures are letting pine do what it wants. In any regard, his work is incredible and unusual. Images of his pieces can be seen at the Ada Gallery website (scroll down on his page, the lower images are linked, which is odd) and at Booooooom (where I first saw his work), among other sites that all contain redundant photos of a few pieces.