Beloved elm tree turned into sculptures
William Penn and Indians with treaty under a large elm in 1683, as shown in a painting by Benjamin West.
Excerpted (but not image above) from article in ecoRI News.
PROVIDENCE — Eiden Spilker’s adventure turning a 100-year-old elm tree into art was “sort of happenstance,” he said, or perhaps a series of happenstances.
Spilker, who graduated from Brown University in 2024, is a technical specialist and maker-in-residence at the Brown Design Workshop, where students and members of the community have access to sewing machines to 3D printers.
The artist had studied architecture and visual art at Brown and worked at the Design Workshop as a monitor when he was a student.
“I basically stayed on to sort of build out the woodworking area and be a resource for community members if they have questions about projects, to do more specialized workshops,” Spilker said.
While Spilker was studying at Brown and setting himself up for his first post-grad job, an elm tree with a gigantic canopy, a fixture on the university’s Main Green, was dying.
Estimated to be between 80 and 120 years old, the elm had escaped Dutch elm disease, the illness that had hit Brown and Providence’s other historic trees almost a decade earlier, and was instead falling victim to things greater than itself: time and humankind.