The Chrees
For more than fifteen years, my work has centered on a single form: the Chree.
Part chair, part tree, the Chree is neither object nor symbol. It is the visual language through which I investigate memory, identity, growth, and the structures that shape human experience.
The first Chree appeared in 2009. Although the work has changed dramatically over the years, I have never left the subject. Each painting, drawing, and sculpture expands the same evolving world, revealing new behaviors, relationships, and forms while remaining rooted in a singular idea.
A Living Vocabulary
Rather than treating the Chree as a fixed metaphor, I think of it as a language.
Some works examine memory as something organic, capable of branching, adapting, and changing over time. Others investigate the systems we construct to organize our lives: routine, architecture, expectation, and inherited experience. The Chree exists where these forces meet.
Each work adds another word to that vocabulary.
Why Trees?
Trees make visible what is usually invisible. They grow, branch, adapt, and carry the record of their lives in their form. We instinctively recognize when a tree is thriving, struggling, ancient, or damaged. In that way, they become natural portraits of growth and experience. Their branching structures also repeat throughout nature, from rivers and lightning to blood vessels and neurons, connecting the personal to the universal. They exist simultaneously at the scale of a forest and the scale of a cell, making them an ideal language for exploring the inner landscape of the mind.
Why Chairs?
Chairs are among the most familiar objects we encounter. We instinctively understand them. We know when one is upright or overturned, facing us or turned away, floating or grounded. They exist within a predictable geometry, making them a natural building block for constructing space.
Unlike trees, chairs are entirely human-made. Every line, angle, and proportion is intentional, designed to support, organize, and serve a purpose. Within the Chrees, the chair becomes more than furniture. It represents the structures we create to contain experience, preserve memory, and make sense of the world around us.
Together
The Chree is neither tree nor chair, but a new form that inherits qualities from both.
It grows organically while remaining anchored to human structure. It records experience while constantly changing through it. Whether standing alone or gathered into vast colonies, every Chree belongs to the same evolving world, one that has unfolded across my work for more than fifteen years.
An Ongoing Investigation
The Chrees are not a subject I revisit. They are the framework through which I understand my practice.
Rather than searching for new imagery, I continue to ask new questions of the same one. Over time, the Chrees have developed an internal logic and history that could never emerge from a single painting alone.
