Every material has its own design quality and none can appropriate the form of another material.
Adolf Loos
The meaning of the Greek word xýlo (wood) is the same as the meaning of materia prima (the source of everything). In that regard, as Kosta Bogdanović noted, one thinks of the wooden form of mythical meaning and the belief in the original model for many architectural and design possibilities, because wood is a natural tree-shaped form in its outer appearance.
The history of sculpture designed in wood can be followed from the earliest preserved examples (in Egyptian pyramids) over the late Gothic to the present day.
By the nature of its structure, form and dimension, wood is easily used in the making of utilitarian, but also sculptural structures and forms. Artists have frequently used walnut, pear, lime-tree, acacia, oak, cherry, ash tree, and for smaller sculptural pieces boxwood, cypress, yew-tree, white beech, olive. Wood from evergreen trees is rarely used for sculptures (e.g. fir, spruce, juniper, pine).
The essential elements of contemporary sculpture – mass, space, material – are not, and in good sculpture they are never the only means and technical elements, but constitutive parts of artistic contents and because of that they have decisive influence on the shaping of the conceptual and philosophical universe of a sculpture.
There are different possibilities in which wood can be used, but the colour and structure of the wooden mass frequently have important aesthetic significance.
