The natural world is comprised of an immense amount of cycles, but they only work when there is balance to them. Humans are disrupting the global climate cycle. In Environmental Threshold, a miniature narrative in sculptural form and a heap, composed of wood shavings, bring awareness of the ongoing issue of environmental degradation and loss of natural resources as humans “modernize” the planet. 

A model is a miniature scale of an easily recognizable form from the human-made or natural environment. These models of trees, fallen logs, stumps, and factories are whittled, hand-carved from basswood blocks, a processed form of this natural material giving the piece an inherent irony.

The wall-piece is narrative, beginning with a substantial number of trees, moving to fewer trees and to their eventual replacement by factories and then to no trees to be found. The sequence ends with regrowth of a sapling growing out of a stump. From the old comes the new. 

The scale of the wall piece draws us close, giving the experience of viewing the world from above, looking down on it as if it were our possession. This positioning replicates the conscious or unconscious view that the world was created for humans to exploit. 

The heap refers to the waste-product of consuming the natural environment, the unused material generated by human progress. The shape and size gives a sense of accumulation. The shavings are the waste material of whittling the trees, stumps and logs over the course of seven months.