Melon Slices

For a forester, properly felling a tree first requires
the making of a well-placed, wedge-shaped “first cut”
to help determine the precise direction in which the
tree will fall.

These first cuts are the wood fragments Miller “gives
new life to,” so to speak. A new life to those sole
remnants of trees that once towered over us all.
Maple, oak, beech, birch, cherry, ash, hemlock or
white pine—each slice of wood was found by the
artist on a rural New Hampshire roadside and then
hand sanded, painted and polished—with no two
melon sides alike.