When a live oak in his yard died last year from oak wilt, Steve Parker was surprised by how saddened he was. The tree had been with his family for years, giving shade in the summer and featuring prominently in his kid’s back-to-school pictures every fall.
He was also confronted with a question many Austinites face after losing a tree: What to do with all the wood?
Live oak "is famous for the ways in which it cracks as it dries, and a lot of woodworkers really hate working with it," he says.
But, as an artist and musician, Parker arrived at a unique solution. It can be heard and seen in his exhibit, "Funeral for a Tree," at the Ivester Contemporary art gallery in East Austin.
Walking into the show, one of the first things you might hear is a scratchy, woody sound. It calls to mind a branch spookily grinding against the side of an old farm house.
Circular slices of the live oak, sometimes called “wood cookies," hang on the wall next to the gallery entrance. Parker has taken these cross sections and found ways to play them like vinyl LPs. He calls them “conceptual and literal” records.
The visual similarities between the cross sections and old record albums helped inspire the idea.
“When we look at a tree and want to look at its life, we look at the stump, because it's like this visual record of its life,” Parker says. ”So it was kind of an obvious thing to explore.”
In another part of the exhibit, an “altar” of live oak supports the pipes of a sheng, a Chinese wind instrument traditionally made with bamboo. The pipes of the sheng are connected to tubes that provide breath to the instrument and fill the space with reedy, harmonious tones.
For Parker, who learned about the sheng on a recent trip to Taiwan, it calls to mind “the way the body shuts down at the end of life ... the heartbeats and also the lungs of the human body played through the shengs.”
More wooden albums hang on anther wall. These thick discs are more polished and refined than the “cookies” near the entrance.
Most of these records are encoded with music, bird songs interpreted on the sheng by Taiwanese musician Jipo Yang, Parker’s friend and collaborator.
The birds — including purple martins, wood thrush and yellow billed cuckoo — are among those that sheltered in the live oak while it stood in Parker’s yard.
Another of the thicker albums has been left un-encoded.
It features a track list of environmental events that Parker believes may become audible within the wood itself. Things like the drought of 2011 and the winter storm of 2021.
"The life of the wood is captured and sort of imprinted upon the sound," Parker says. "Over time, it will actually fade a little bit more, just like a memory.”
To demonstrate, he places another live oak disc on a wooden turntable inspired by an old Victrola. The stylus, or needle, is a toothpick.
This album has been imprinted with the folk ballad "Bury Me Beneath the Willow," as performed by Ernest Thompson in 1924.
"Oh bury me beneath the willow, beneath the weeping willow tree and when she knows that I am sleeping there, perhaps she'll think of me ..."
It is a haunting rendition, faintly audible under the whir and scratch of wood on wood. The distortion is partly a familiar old vinyl hiss, partly something very different.
“As our tree got sick, one thing that was noticeable for me as a parent was ... how it echoed what I experienced six years ago when my dad was really sick with cancer,” Parker says. “I often think about my dad when I'm working in the studio; I listen to music that he would have listened to. And this is just something for me to kind of maintain a connection with him.”
"Funeral for a Tree" runs through Saturday at Ivester Contemporary on Springdale Road.
