It was exciting to see Tucker Marder’s past experiences in “puppeteering,” where actors wear costumes or use puppets to act out certain scenes to help teach their audience about a certain topic. For example, they used puppets to help teach health class and even used costumes in their performance, where they were highlighting certain types of birds.
In terms of Tucker’s work with trees, it was really interesting to see all the different types of trees that he was able to preserve and shape into art through his Folly Tree Arboretum. He talked about the different processes that he used to help shape and grow some of his trees, and even talked about the unique history and backstory of certain trees. For example, the grafted hoop sycamore is a tree in which they grafted another tree onto a tree and used a ring to bind and shape the tree into a hoop. Another example is their Serbian Spruce ‘Pendula Bruns’, where they took the weeping branches of the Serbian Spruce and bound them to a leader that allowed the tree to grow into such a shape that resembles an animal.
While Tucker was showing us his work with the trees, it was also noticed that he had a duck present in every photo. When mentioned, it was revealed that the duck in the pictures was involved in a series in which the duck would have its picture taken with every tree, and that there was a project regarding geese called Stampede! This was a puppet show in which there were a whole bunch of ducks placed on a large field with various abstract shapes, and they were made to run across the field with the shapes moving around with a camera capturing them as they ran across the field.
Sources: https://follytreearboretum.com/