Crowds turn out for annual sharpening of 20-foot-tall pencil

Australian Community Media

The pencil, known as the Loti Tree, was once a much-beloved 180-year-old bur oak before it was damaged by a thunderstorm in 2017.   In 2022, Higgins then commissioned Curtis Ingvoldstad to sculpt the damaged tree into a living artwork, in the form of a 20-foot-tall No.2 pencil.

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00:41We thought, let's do something basic, simple

00:44that we can execute.

00:46But something that's classic.

00:47It was hard to find a sculptor who could

00:50technically execute this project.

00:52Curtis Inglestad, a brilliant sculptor.

00:55First, you have to be an artist.

00:56You have to understand art and art form

00:59and how it relates to the human eye.

01:01He's a wood sculptor, chainsaw artist,

01:04and then finally, he's an engineer.

01:05He's actually a mathematician, but then he saw it.

01:08I mean, just like Michelangelo,

01:09he saw this pencil within this tree trunk

01:12and just did a fantastic job with it.

01:22Well, so the number two, it's a classic.

01:25As students, we took the math test.

01:27We had to fill in the ovals.

01:28We wrote letters, maybe a love letter, a poem,

01:31but the color of a pencil, the feel of a pencil,

01:35the sound when you sharpen it, the smell of the cedar,

01:37I mean, there's so much special about a pencil

01:39that we can all relate to.

01:48It's an event in sculpting it, but it's also a pencil,

01:52and a pencil needs to be sharpened.

01:54When you sharpen it, it's a promise to write a formula,

01:56to write a love letter, to write a story.

01:58It'll be a living sculpture in that sense.

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