These are actually the most creative, beautiful and delicate sculptures I have ever seen AND they’re made from simple everyday shopping bags! Yuken Teruya (the genius behind these mini trees) is known for his references to consumer culture and traditional craft techniques – in this case, showing the link between mass consumerism and the forest which brings forward the concept of global environmental destruction.
In this work, Teruya tries to regenerate the spirit of trees. He is inspired by Aristotle’s philosophy of nature that regards the development of potentiality to actuality as one of the most important aspects to learn from nature. An example of this is when an acorn, which is a seed of an oak tree, begins to grow up, it already has within it the potentiality of an oak tree. Similarly a full grown oak tree is proof of the potentiality of the acorn. Teruya tries to give rebirth to the spirit of the trees by his technique using these paper products, since he believes that there is a spirit of the tree which is contained on the surface of these paper products.
