At the start of November, Simon announced he’d joined ‘Team Titan’, and become part of the Titan Treecycle initiative, but we have never explained what that means! We thought we’d use this week’s blog to explain a little more about the project, and why it’s such an important initiative…
Simon’s initial Treecycle announcement
About Titan Chainsaw Carving
Before we talk about the Titan Treecycle initiative, let’s back up a few steps and start with Titan!
Titan Chainsaw carving is a recently opened specialist chainsaw carving tools supply store, started by chainsaw carver Matt Crabb. He’s been a professional chainsaw carver for 15 years, so he certainly knows what carvers of all skill levels need! And although it has begun as a chainsaw carving supplies store, Matt hopes it will be much more.
He wants to support, encourage, inspire, and help new carvers – people with an interest to try carving. He also wants Titan to be a place where beginners come alongside pros, somewhere knowledge and inspiration can be shared.
Matt Crabb is the founder of Titan Treecycle initiative Photo taken from his Facebook page.
Team Titan!
To help form that community, Matt has formed a team of world-class chainsaw carvers as ambassadors of the brand. As a team, they will also work collaboratively on large-scale carving projects. Simon is honoured to be one of the team, along with Matt, James Elliott, Mike Jones, Michael Tamoszus, Ryan Villiers, Res Hofmann, Simon Archer, and Hikaru Kodama.
Exciting as this is, Matt also has a bigger out-reaching vision, and that’s where the Titan Treecycle Initiative comes in…
Water Dragon by Simon and Keiji Kidokoro at Huskycup 2019 – a taste of the quality and artistry expected from the Titan collaboration
The Vision Behind Titan Treecycle
Matt is highly aware of the situation with climate change and the desperate need for big change in the world (an awareness Simon shares). As a result, one of his goals is to ensure Titan runs as completely carbon negative. What a fantastic goal! This lead him to an organisation called Tree-Nation, and the Titan Treecyle initiative came from that contact.
Tree-Nation has a goal of reforesting the world. They want to use technology to make tree planting easy and provide support, advice and solutions to citizens and companies to help them transition towards a sustainable future.
Some of the Tree-Nation team Photo taken from the Tree Nation website
The Initiative Unfolds…
Matt decided to use Titan and the team’s ever-growing online presence in the chainsaw carving community, to promote an initiative for every chainsaw carver to replant more trees each year than they use. So he started Titan Treecycle.
Titan Treecycle is a ‘Forest’ or project, within Tree-Nation. Chainsaw Carvers can donate money towards the forest, and Tree-Nation uses that money to plant trees in one of their reforestation projects. If every chainsaw carver in the world joined this action, it would make a monumental change to our carbon footprint.
In Matt’s words:
“It should become the norm. We [chainsaw carvers] use up trees to carve luxury items with carbon-emitting tools. Lots of carvers travel around and fly across the world to compete etc. It would be so so easy and at very little cost per individual to offset all of this. If we as a trade could set about this positive change, then perhaps our example can be used to show other trades and industries the way forward.“
Looking at the Titan Treecycle Forest page, so far (December 2021) the group have planted 321 trees and offset 142t of carbon dioxide. A great start in only a couple of months!
The forest page provides updates and accountability for members and supporters
Simon and the Titan Treecycle Initiative
It’s fairly well known that Simon only uses trees that are dead, diseased or dangerous for his sculptures, and never cuts trees down specifically to carve. So why join Treecycle? In his words: “Even though all the wood I currently use has been cut for a valid reason, I feel this is an excellent way to encourage the carving world to go the extra mile in looking after the planet we’re so blessed to live on.”
And there’s more…
The Giant Hand of Vyrnwy stands in the Lake Vyrnwy estate. The sculpture is one of Simon’s most famous examples of transforming a storm-damaged tree
Team Titan Collaboration
Remember we mentioned collaborative projects? The Titan team are planning to meet up in England in April this year to collaborate on (matt’s words!) “the biggest and most spectacular chainsaw carving project on earth!”
At this stage we can’t say anything more, but it promises to be epic!
There haven’t been many occasions before this where a large collective of elite professional artists have collaborated together in such a big way. As Matt says, “It’s going to be a very special project and a huge step forward for the wonderful art of chainsaw carving“.
Simon is excited about the collaboration, and of course, we’ll be sharing about it here!
