Dr Geoffrey Farrer-Brown is working with art and artists to communicate the essence of ideas that he holds deep within himself and have grown over a life working with and seeing hearts of people who had died from smoking. I found myself working with someone who at essence saw the great beauty of the heart and it was this fact that he wanted my work to communicate. As a carpenter and joiner I have always found the multiple ways in which one piece of wood can be joined to another most fascinating and to find new ways of joining timber is a continuous challenge. The heart muscular cells are lengthening and shortening, over and over, again and again, beat after beat throughout our lives. I started by building my heart of yew by joining one ‘cell of yew’ with the next ‘cell of yew’. Then came the third and forth and on as the heart started to grow before me. As in all growth the finished being is in fact unknown and off into the future somewhere. In carpentry most wood is joined one straight flat surface to another but in nature this is very rare. To join two pieces of inch thick yew, where the meeting surfaces are all curved is a challenge indeed. 108 separate pieces of yew make up the whole and this technical achievement contributes to the attraction and fascination of the viewer. The steel base was spun on a lathe and the vertical tube welded to it. The 900 fibre optic cables, each of which contains 80 hair thick strands of glass, pass up inside this which are set flush with the surface of the carved arteries and veins. Each of the two light machines in the base include a glass disk which rotates slowly between the light bulb and the polished ends of 450 fibre optic cables. The flickering colours are produced by painting the disc with transparent paint, creating an effect of movement or flow within the still image. At the root is the fact that if people can touch the sculpture then the sculpture will touch them which is at the heart of the Tree of Life exhibition.