what the wood remembers

She founded the Webby Awards, made films for three decades, and now burns history into salvaged wood, one letter at a time.

Near the heart of a tree ring hanging on her studio wall, small burned letters read: 4.6 billion years ago, the Earth forms. The rings widen in silence for the length of an arm. The next entry appears a finger’s width from the bark: Humans arrive.

Tiffany Shlain’s studio faces the water beside a boat harbor. She works with a pyrography tool, a heated metal tip that darkens wood one letter at a time. There is no undo. When she found a spelling error in a nearly finished piece bound for a public showing, she called her New York gallery, mortified. “Tiffany, that means it was made by a human,” she was told. “Humans make mistakes.” The error remains in the grain.

// Continued on PAGE 66 in VOLUME I //

PHOTOGRAPHY // Thom Milkovic