Fashioning the crooked tree

Breaking wood apart to put it back together again, Jared Pankin reminds us of the delicate relationship between man and nature. Review by Billy Leahy

The humble two-by-four is artist Jared Pankin's weapon of choice. The Albany-born sculptor eagerly slices, splices and chips away at blocks of timber until he has produced enough raw materials to set about hammering and gluing them back together to create highly elaborate and complex wall-mounted works. Currently two of these pieces are on display in Dublin's Rubicon gallery in the up-and-coming artist's debut show in Europe.

These sculptures, with fragmented limbs and tentacles stretching and trailing off at every angle, are Pankin's attempt to portray the oft fraught and tense relationship between nature and the man-made environment. There is a definite ecological message in the pieces, with the artist hinting constantly at the fragility of nature and how the balance between the artificial and the natural is extremely delicate and constantly vulnerable.

The theme of Pankin's artistic exploration, which can be summed up as the interaction between the natural world and the artificial or constructed, comes through strongly in both of the sculptures, but also in the method he employs in their creation. There is a knowing irony in the choice of a two-by-four as the original material; already this is something that has been taken from nature before being cut, shaped and transformed into a man-made product. That this raw material could well take the form of a square – held by Suprematism as the defining symbol of man's dominance over nature – makes it even more fitting.

In the second stage of production, Pankin hacks the block apart, adds other found wood and is left with a mixed bag of irregular-shaped fragments blocks and woodchips. He then slowly nails and sticks these pieces together to form an intricate assemblage that builds and progresses in such a natural way that the final product has a definite feel of the organic. This final twist brings the wood back to a more natural-looking form, even if this has been achieved by further manipulation.

These small, understated ironies are normally underpinned by an element of humour in Pankin's work. In the two untitled pieces at the Rubicon, however, this is hard to find, with the works possessing a more serious air than what we might have expected given his previous oeuvre. The jettisoning of quirky components and absurd titles is no great loss; in fact, it is probably a plus point, and one which suggests Pankin is becoming a more assured artist and that he may have found a comfortable visual language to develop.

But like his base material, a simple block of two-by-four, Pankin's work does have an edge but at the same time lacks originality. It is difficult to find enough aesthetically or, indeed, conceptually of interest to hand either work more than a couple of minutes of attention. Despite the random forms and unpredictability of shape – both of the small pieces and the actual work – Pankin's sculptures are hard work in a bad way; refusing to give much back as reward for the viewer's effort and patience. Perhaps it is all just a little bit banal – or should that be wooden...