Oak Parker Margot McMahon is an artist, but not just any artist. She identifies as an eco-artist, and her work has been changing the Chicago landscape in more ways than one.
Having a lot of logs in her backyard as a child inspired McMahon to start carving wood when she was in seventh grade, and she hasn’t looked back. Those early endeavors marked her launch into a career as a sculptor. She invented an earth-friendly cement mix called Fondu concrete and worked with that medium before entering what she calls her bronze period.
Then, Emerald Ash Borers hit the Chicago area, leaving behind a wake of dead trees. McMahon saw the dead trees as an opportunity to change sculpting mediums while raising awareness.
She recalls, “Ash Borer disease hit Chicago — over 150,000 trees — and millions of dollars were going to be spent to remove them.”
She applied to the Chicago Park District to carve one of the dead trees and was the first person accepted into their nascent tree carving program.
That first project was a sweeping tree off of Lake Shore Drive in Jackson Park. She created larger-than-life sculptures of birds and owls. Within three weeks, the park district asked her to run The Chicago Tree Project.
McMahon says making sculptures from dead trees is the perfect way to talk about the climate crisis. She used her carving to make a statement about the canopy of Chicago trees being eradicated.
Beyond the symbolism of the project, she notes that there are real benefits to carving dead trees and keeping them in the ecosystem.
“There’s an awareness that this tree has died, and we can keep it around longer. The ecology of keeping a dying tree is incredible. You have food for birds and a place for their nests. Varmints can live in the wood, and the roots feed new trees. The old trees are providing nutrients for thousands of creatures. You can give these trees a fifth season.”
She also stresses that dead trees are carbon sequesters and says reusing dead trees for art or woodworking keeps the carbon out of the air.
Through her work with The Chicago Tree Project, McMahon noted an unexpected perk: community building.
She was working on a carving at Belmont and Lake Shore Drive when no fewer than three friends who lived in neighboring high-rises told her they were watching her work from above.
“The idea is that the tree is now a symbol for the neighborhood — like we can say, ‘turn left at the spiral sculpture.’ It became a kind of totem, which is really cool in terms of neighborhood building.”
McMahon directed The Chicago Tree Project for five years, bringing together artists through Chicago Sculpture International to work on tree carvings throughout the city. McMahon’s work and the work of other artist carvers, who came from around the country and from as far away as Peru, is documented at the website: https://www.chicagotreeproject.org/
Inspired by their work, she also wrote a book of poetry entitled, The Fifth Season: The Chicago Tree Project, aimed at explaining the importance of the trees to a younger audience. She also authored If Trees Could Talk, a hybrid memoir and historical fiction work that details the lives of her parents.
Today, she continues to work as an artist and channels her love of trees into a sapling initiative, through which she leads a group on the South Side every Earth Day in tending to saplings.
“We picked the South Side because they really lost their canopy. But we are tending 55 saplings, which is making a difference. We learn how to take care of them, have a lunch and then write poetry about the trees.”
McMahon has sculpted a tree or two in Oak Park as well and notes that the village is also marked by the devastation of tree-borne diseases. First, Dutch Elm disease took out hundreds of parkway trees in the 1970s, and then Emerald Ash Borer arrived later to take out more.
She recalls her block losing roughly 10 trees during that period and notes it really changed her perception of where she lived. She praises the Oak Park arborists for their work in responding to these hits to the ecosystem.
“Oak Park really is an arboretum. Planting a diversity of trees is important. We are getting our canopy back,” she says.
Today, she leads a block party exercise in which participants try to guess the new species of trees on the blocks. For her, the trees lining the streets and filling the yards are more than just living decoration. She emphasizes, “Trees are our markers, these things are part of what you feel home is.”
