Sons de Mélèze (Sounds of the Larch Tree)

Since the late 1960s, Giuseppe Penone has been creating a range of conceptual works that explore mankind’s interactions with the natural world, focusing especially on trees. The woodcut shown here grew out of a project that involved using a mallet to strike the trunks of 14 varieties of trees in order to register the vibrations particular to each species. Recordings were made of the individual sound reverberations, which were then converted into musical scores. For this print, Penone took the musical notation produced from the larch tree and reproduced it on a length of larch wood. Measuring 206 inches (5.25 meters), the woodcut had to be scrolled, and it has the distinction of being one of the longest prints to be impressed from a single matrix.