Wood artist and arborist Robert George draws on his varied experiences of timber and trees to create a technically demanding series of large-scale crucibles. Using a mixture of storm-felled oak and saw-felled sycamore, turned on a lathe and worked using traditional hand tools, these culturally significant timbers help to tell a story of our new world and how we can cope in it. The series, entitled Simmer Down, pushes the boundaries of what can be created while using standard tooling, and opens the door to a new, experimental direction in the artist’s work – using entropy, highly finished surfaces and scale to create juxtaposition and invite a tactile and humbling response while paying homage to the trees he has taken from