An encounter with Rona Pondick’s Untitled Tree (1997)
One March afternoon on the lawn near the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell, you might notice a small, leafless tree rising from a circle of red gravel. At first it seems merely dormant, another tree waiting for the long Ithaca winter to loosen its grip. But as you approach, the scene grows quietly unsettling. Around the trunk lie dozens of smooth gray forms—small, rounded objects like stones or fruit that have fallen from the branches.
Then you see the teeth.
The objects scattered beneath the tree are cast aluminum forms bearing unmistakably human molars. They appear to have dropped from the tree like strange metallic apples, a harvest that belongs less to botany than to anatomy. This disquieting grove is Untitled Tree (1997) by the American sculptor Rona Pondick.
The Artist of Hybrids
Pondick, born in Brooklyn in 1952 and trained at Queens College and the Yale School of Art, has spent decades exploring the language of the body in sculpture—often literally. Her work frequently uses casts of body parts, particularly teeth or her own head, creating forms that merge human anatomy with animals, plants, or everyday objects.
The result is a sculptural vocabulary that feels simultaneously ancient and uncanny. Critics often describe her work as “hybrid”—a blending of the human body with other forms, echoing mythic creatures such as sphinxes or centaurs while remaining distinctly contemporary.
Teeth have been a recurring motif in Pondick’s art since the 1980s, when she began casting them and embedding them in unexpected contexts. These fragments of the body carry a peculiar emotional charge: they evoke childhood, appetite, vulnerability, and mortality all at once.
A Sculpture That Feels Like a Dream
Created in 1997, Untitled Tree belongs to a group of works where Pondick began experimenting with trees as sculptural forms. She has explained that she sometimes uses actual branches or trunks as starting points for casting in metal, translating natural textures into aluminum or steel.
The Cornell sculpture is monumental yet restrained:
- a cast-aluminum tree,
- surrounded by dozens of small aluminum objects,
- each about the size of a stone but bearing human teeth.
Seen from a distance, the scene reads like a quiet landscape intervention. Up close, however, it feels like a fragment from a surreal dream—a tree that has shed something disturbingly human.
The Poetry of the Fallen Teeth
Standing before it on that March afternoon, one might think of the sculpture as a botanical riddle.
Trees drop fruit.
They drop leaves.
In autumn they drop seeds.
But this tree has dropped teeth.
The idea is both playful and faintly macabre. The small aluminum forms resemble seeds, yet their teeth suggest the human mouth—the place of speech, hunger, laughter, and loss. The sculpture seems to whisper that the natural world and the human body are not separate realms but entwined systems of growth and decay.
In the red gravel circle beneath the tree, the objects appear almost archaeological, as though a curious species once grew here and shed fragments of itself into the soil.
Cornell’s Quiet Surrealist Grove
Placed on the lawn near the Johnson Museum’s striking I. M. Pei building, the sculpture forms a gentle conversation between art, architecture, and landscape. In winter the bare branches echo the skeletal trees around it. In summer the aluminum trunk gleams among living foliage.
And the scattered teeth remain—silent, patient, and oddly humorous.
They remind us that nature, like art, can be unsettling and beautiful at the same time.
Michael Stephen Wills Photography 