As speculation about humans colonizing the moon and Mars ramps up, it’s increasingly likely that we’ll see attempts at living in places previously unthinkable. For Henry Wood, the potential for inhabiting Mars, in particular, has inspired a series of wooden figures with quite a turbulent backstory.
“The premise of this growing body of work is that in the not-too-distant future, humanity will establish a doomed colony on Mars,” he tells Colossal. Each figure has a specific history, their difficulties and demise carved into wood. The character he refers to as Scott, for example, found himself stranded at the South Pole, while an onslaught of ice from the sea buried Franklin. The title of the series fits this ill-fated adventure, too: We went to Mars and it was a disaster.
The idea for the collection began about a decade ago when the artist visited a Cairo museum and witnessed how conservators had reconfigured broken objects. “I am in awe of relics from Antiquity and wanted to imagine what it would be like in the distant future doing archaeology on other planets long after we had terraformed them,” he says. “I imagine them as statues or artifacts depicting great figures from Antiquity, resurrected from the ground and reconstructed to piece together the story of what went wrong on the Red planet.”
Each long-limbed adventurer takes several weeks to complete, with most of the pieces meticulously planned. Wood shares that sketchbooks are essential in mapping out his projects, and so is travel itself—although the artist doesn’t venture as far as his explorers. “I am visually interested in people, particularly in what their clothes say about them and their beliefs and values,” he says.
Wood prefers to gather materials as he travels or encounters objects that have a story. “I am always shipping bits of wood back to the workshop from wherever I am in the world,” he adds. Recent trips to the Pacific Northwest and Oaxaca allowed him to incorporate new tools and traditions, too. These emerge in the ways he often highlights the texture and grain of the wood and juxtaposes various techniques. “I love the contrast of tight acute angles alongside organic tears, splits, and fibers,” he adds.
Follow the artist’s process and keep an eye out for the latest adventurer to be added to the ranks on Instagram.
