THE MAN WHO BECAME TREE

Lisa Gingles

The Man Who Became Tree

2026

Polymer clay, acrylic paint and wooden box

H 34 cm x W 20 cm x D 8 cm / H 13.39 in x W 7.87 in x D 3.15 in

This artwork is Unique

Certificate of Authenticity included

Every artwork travels protected with the same care with which it was chosen.

Lisa Gingles moves fluidly between drawing, collage and sculpture, drawn again and again to figures caught mid-transformation, poised between one state of being and another. Her hybrid characters and half-remembered beings are shaped by mythology, folklore, travel and memory, born of a life lived between Northern Ireland, where she was born in 1974, and Valencia, her home since 1998.

The Man Who Became Tree takes its inspiration from an Irish folk legend rooted in County Antrim. In 1588, following the wreck of the Spanish Armada, a sailor’s body is said to have washed ashore at Ballygally, on the Antrim coast, carrying with him a handful of chestnuts, likely kept to ward off scurvy during the voyage. Local people buried him in an unmarked grave in the churchyard of St Patrick’s Church of Ireland, in nearby Cairncastle, and a sweet chestnut tree grew from that same soil, its origin still credited by local memory to the seeds the drowned man carried. Known for centuries as the Armada Tree, it stood as a local landmark until it fell in 2020. Gingles reimagines that quiet transformation of a stranger into a tree, sailor into landscape, as the small, enclosed sculpture within its wooden box: a body remembered by the land that received it, rendered in polymer clay and acrylic as a private act of mourning turned into growth.

To collect The Man Who Became Tree is to hold a piece built from one of Ireland’s own half-forgotten stories, translated into an intimate sculptural object by an artist whose sense of inherited legend runs, quite literally, through family soil. It is a work that carries centuries of local memory into something you can keep close, from an artist steadily gaining recognition beyond Ireland’s shores.