The Science Behind the Art

Carpenter ants — genus Camponotus — are among the largest ants in North America, with workers ranging from half an inch to nearly three-quarters of an inch long. The western black carpenter ant, Camponotus modoc, is the species most commonly responsible for the gallery work found throughout the forests of the Pacific Northwest.

Despite their name, carpenter ants do not eat wood. They are excavators. Using their powerful mandibles, they chew through wood fiber to create nesting galleries — smooth, clean-walled chambers that look as though they were shaped by a craftsman's tool. The excavated material, a fine sawdust called frass, is pushed out of the galleries and discarded.

A mature colony can contain 10,000 to 20,000 workers, with large colonies exceeding 50,000 individuals. The parent colony is typically located outdoors — in a tree stump, a fallen log, or old firewood — with satellite colonies branching outward as the population grows.

Carpenter ants prefer to begin their work in dead standing trees and wood that has been softened by fungal decay. In the forests of the Pacific Northwest, dead standing timber and old-growth stumps provide ideal conditions — years of wet winters and freeze-thaw cycles break down the outer wood fibers, giving the ants a foothold.

Once established, the ants excavate along the wood's grain, following the softer early-wood bands between the denser growth rings. The result is a network of interconnected chambers and tunnels — some no wider than a pencil, others large enough to house hundreds of workers. The gallery walls are left remarkably smooth, almost polished, with a sand-papered appearance that entomologists note as a defining characteristic of carpenter ant work.

Over years and decades, as the colony expands and satellite nests branch outward, the gallery system grows in complexity. What begins as a simple nesting cavity becomes an intricate three-dimensional labyrinth — a record of the colony's entire history, carved in wood.

The pieces John works with come from Idaho's national forests — old-growth timber country where ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, Idaho white pine and western larch have stood for centuries. When these trees fall, they don't disappear. They become habitat, slowly reclaimed by fungi, beetles, and ants over decades.

The most extraordinary gallery work is found in wood that has been colonized for many years — sometimes generations of ant colonies, each expanding on what the last left behind. The wood itself becomes a kind of geological record: the tight rings of slow growth, the wide rings of wet years, all cut through by the ants' precise excavations.

When John finds a piece, he's not just finding a material. He's finding a document — a record of weather, growth, decay, and animal behavior compressed into a single object. The art is already there. His work is to reveal it.

Carpenter ant galleries are three-dimensional — they run through the full depth of the wood, not just across its surface. When light is introduced from within, it travels through the gallery network and emerges through every opening, turning the wood into something closer to a lantern than a sculpture.

The density of the gallery work determines how the light behaves. Tightly packed chambers diffuse the light into a warm, even glow. Wider, more open galleries create dramatic pools of brightness against dark wood walls. No two pieces behave the same way — the light is as individual as the colony that made it.

John uses LED lighting specifically for its ability to render the warm amber tones of aged wood without the heat that would damage it. The result is a piece that is alive in a way that changes with the viewer's position — different angles reveal different chambers, different depths, different stories written in wood and light.