The Detroit Tree of Heaven Woodshop
est. 2005
A project by
Mitch Cope, artist, Detroit
Ingo Vetter, artist, Stockholm
Annette Weisser, artist, Los Angeles
Originating in China, the Tree of Heaven (lat. Ailanthus, in Detroit colloquially known as “ghetto palm” or “stink tree”) conquered the world in the luggage of migrant workers. The first specimen in the U.S. could be found in east coast arboretums in 1748, but the tree came in large numbers with Chinese migrants during the Californian gold rush of the 18th century. It was popular as a decorative tree and valuable for traditional Chinese medicine, which used the tree for treating ailments ranging from digestion problems, asthma to cancer. However, the hidden quality of the Tree of Heaven appears first when left to their own anarchic invasiveness and their ability to grow in polluted, poor or very little soil as it is often found climbing out of abandoned factories and houses, lamp posts and even sidewalks and concrete structures, make this tree the plant of post-industrial landscapes. Today the Tree of Heaven thrives weed-like in abandoned lots and deserted factory sites throughout Detroit.
These layers of historical and metaphorical meaning together with it’s abundance made us think of the wood as an old fashioned resource for a new creative industry. Since it’s growing very fast, the wood is of poor quality, so we were told. However, it has a beautiful grain and, if processed carefully, it is a great and unusual material for sculptures or furniture.
We began in the summer of 2005 with asking Kevin Bingham, a city-based arborist, to take down the first couple of trees and hired a mobile sawmill, “Last Chance Lumber”, to mill the trunks. After curing the stack of logs in the garage of a friend over winter, we processed the wood in the carpenters’ workshop at the College for Creative Studies. The Woodshop grew into a network of people with different ideas, skills and possibilities, utilizing existing infrastructure and resources to produce unique products from the Tree of Heaven. Within the context of present day Detroit, something as unspectacular as processing local wood becomes an absurd performance. The Workshop acts as an agent of communication and its products are highly rhetorical.
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Vessels
We received a commission by the Museum Arbeitswelt (museum of labor) in Steyr/Austria in 2006. For their permanent exhibition “workingworld.net”, they asked for a city portrait of Detroit emphasizing the neglect after the decline of the car industry.
We created ten vessels, turned water tanks in accordance with traditional uses of ailanthus wood in Chinese traditional medicine. The outlines were based on statistical curves referring to negative clichés Detroit is so well known for: unemployment, homicides, vacant lots, building permits, teenage pregnancies, etc. The statistics were provided by Jason Booza from the Center for Urban Studies at Wayne State University. The lathe work was done by Greg Smith, a former engineer at GM, now a professional wood turner.
In the museum the vessels are displayed together with a video of tree-spotting in Detroit and a short description of the woodshop along with portraits and quotes from six innovative Detroit thinkers on the future of the city.
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Museum Benches
The second order was placed by the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MoCAD) on the occasion of the exhibition “Shrinking Cities” in 2007. We designed a simple bench for the newly opened museum. Again, we cooperated with the College of Creative Studies and Detroit artist Dylan Spaysky to produce two prototypes. These benches were on display at MOCAD together with a stack of milled wood, recycled signage (from closed down Detroit businesses and shops) bearing the woodshop logo, a skull with an ailanthus growing through. Another tree spotting video and our “founders photo” (see first image) framed in custom made frames (Tree of Heaven, of course) completed the presentation.
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Ghetto Palm Steam Room to Cure What Ails You
We received the third order from artist and curator Graem White who was working on an exhibition at Gallery Project in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The show presented devices to facilitate creativity, work, expression and necessary tasks, as well as those which interpret the world around us. For this exhibition, we decided to further explore the trees healing capacities and we came up with the “Ghetto Palm Steam Room to Cure What Ails You”. We created a special kiln that was able not only to dry the wood, but extract the moisture and save it. This produced over 5 gallons of Tree of Heaven water every day for two months. We saved this water and later used it to produce steam for the Ghetto Palm Steam Room. The smell was obviously that of the Ghetto Palm. Pieces of wood from the tree were placed on the ground creating a loose wood floor and two half stumps were made into seats. On the outside of the steam room was the humidifier with a tube feeding the steam into the room and a supply of tree of heaven water in recycled plastic Absopure water containers.
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Saplings for SALE
Currently we are selling Tree of Heaven saplings at the “Design 99” store in Hamtramck, MI. Some of the saplings are transplants from the alleys of Detroit and Hamtramck and some are grown directly from seeds. This represents the two ways the tree reproduces, from spreading of it’s roots and from the spreading of it’s seeds.
They are 99 cents for seed grown and $1.99 for transplants.
