REGISTER NOW: WEBINAR: “Wood-as-guitar: An elemental gateway to a relational life”, Tuesday 2nd September 2025 from 4.00 pm – 5.30 pm AEST by Zoom

REGISTER NOW: "Wood-as-guitar: An elemental gateway to a relational life", In Conversation with Chris Gibson & Andrew Warren
Tuesday 2nd September 2025, 4.00-5.30 pm AEST,
Register at: https://bit.ly/4ituMNh
Abstract:
Wood acts as a gateway to consideration of the relationships that bind together humans, industries, and nature. Empires have risen and fallen over forests. Wood has fuelled industries, warmed bodies, built ships, and, in turn, enabled continents to be violently conquered and cities constructed. In 2014, a chance conversation with a Hawaiian elder and an invitation to travel with him to witness surviving ancient trees led Andrew Warren and Chris Gibson to a research project ‘following’ the timbers used to make guitars. Six years later, they brought their travels, archival work, and interviews across 10 countries on six continents together in a book, The Guitar: Tracing the Grain Back to the Tree (U. Chicago Press). The book is laid out as a journey—following wood from guitar to factory, factory to sawmill, sawmill to forests, and eventually to the trees—­and travels historically and geographically, tracing the people, ideas, and materials of guitar making. Each of the guitar woods followed has distinctive forest histories, indigenous meanings, episodes of destruction, and attempts at ecological recuperation. Amidst a lurking sense of uncertainty about a future unsettled by scarcity and impending climatic tumult, there is also an appetite for principled action among wood suppliers, guitar manufacturers, and consumers. A long-­held bond between humans and forests, abused and misunderstood, still captures the imagination—­a wellspring of shared experience from dwelling on Earth that we can access in contemplating better futures.