Do you want to have a look at a sculpture that's rotting?
Sorry, rotting's the wrong word.
It's decaying back into the ground where it came from, basically.
So it is, in fact, a whole ecosystem.
There are things living in it, living on it, by it.
And it gives me a great deal of pleasure to watch it go back to where it came from,
because basically nothing ever dies.
Things just change from one form into another.
Even human beings, when you look at human beings,
we come from every tiny egg that you can't really see,
to a seed that goes in there, which you can't see,
and from that small thing that you can't see,
what grows is ugly specimens such as me that stands before you now,
which is a complex make-up of different cells.
Absolutely unbelievable, really, what's going on.
And the same with the tree, the tree grows.
When I die, this function ceases, but I will turn into either ash if I'm burnt,
or I will feed the ground if I'm buried.
But either way, what I do is I just turn, change from one form into another.
So therefore, everything is eternal.
I always have been in one form or another, and I always will be in one form or another.
I've learnt over the years my politics have changed,
my philosophy has changed, and I hope it's deepened,
and it shows more understanding about the world,
how we should live together, how we should try and help each other,
rather than hurt each other all the time.
Hence the love for wood, I think.
Who's going to have a bite after me then?
Absolutely.
How is she?
Juicy, full of flavour.
Like?
Thank you again to the tree.
For those that require it.
My name is Victor Bentley.
I am 64 years of age.
I'm reaching the grand old retirement point next year, officially.
I am a sculptor in wood and a wood carver.
So basically, I enjoy my life by reading, philosophising, deciding what a being is.
Being being is we're all beings and we're all the same at the end of the day.
I have a love of trees and things that grow.
My health is not the best in the world.
It could be better, but I'm okay and I'm happy with who I am and what I do.
I enjoy drawing, I find it totally absurd about it,
but the one thing I really do like is carving wood.
There's a little lady at the back that's a piece of wood that's going on at the moment.
Wood, trees.
I have to be careful now because I can bore people to death like this.
Wood is probably the most useful material that human beings have ever used, come across.
Unfortunately, with the way the world has been, that is, some trees are now endangered species.
There are lots of woods that we don't touch that can be imported.
It's illegal to report them, even with licenses.
They are banned timbers because they are very, very rare.
And that's the way it should be at the end of the day, because trees can grow for four, five, four, five thousand years.
And you think a creature that's, because they are actually creatures, trees, they are beings.
Something that's lived for five thousand years has witnessed an awful lot more than we ever do in our poultry little lifetimes.
I've always considered trees themselves to be beings. I do these days anyway.
Trees are as complex as human beings.
Every human being is an individual and every tree is an individual.
And as the years and the generations go by, they change and they evolve just like we have.
If we said, English oak today is very rare, it's getting rarer and rarer.
And on the commercial market, much more expensive.
Oak trees are auctioned in the field before they even fell sometimes.
That's how much English oak is now worth.
But the oak that's around now is not the oak that they build their armada from.
The oak trees in those days no longer, that would no longer exist.
It has evolved, it's changed.
Every year there are new generations of trees that are born and they're not the same as the ones before.
So trees themselves are, they're just too complex and I stand and talk to them.
People think I might be being insane for this and probably I might be.
Who knows what normal is?
This is from a Polynesian tiki design and it's got a nice little bump.
So it's neither male nor female.
It just makes me laugh.
One of my favourite pieces is this one.
It has a love life drawing. This is your skeleton and half a face with details.
And the framework is actually a combination of bones, tendons and ligaments all used in a different way.
There are lots and lots of trees around but there's not enough.
It is renewable. Everybody should be responsible for planting at least one tree in their life, sometimes in their lifetime anyway.
But as a renewable source is it not better to build things and make things out of wood than it is plastic which uses oil.
Metals which mean we have to mine ores out of the ground.
We have to rape the earth basically to produce the things we need.
If we actually used more wood to actually build and make things which are quite beautiful to work with I love touching wood it's very tactile.
And it will satisfy a lot of needs that we use plastic, steel and all sorts of things for.
We could use wood and it is a renewable resource. We can keep growing it.
The pencil was used as a means of communication from one person to another.
Its influence has always been really not appreciated.
The favoured wood for the pencil is cedar. It smells nice, soft.
I'm sure many people remember sharpening a pencil and smelling cedar wood.
Yeah the pencil is very, as it has been and still is very, very influential.
Some of the finest rinds are done with pencil.
You can use simple damage to textile as well.
So we're going to start at the base of the cut lens.
Thank you.
