Bark, with a bold type: The font that grew on a tree

In 2016, Danish designer Bjørn Karmann, carved out the 29 letters of the Danish Alphabet (26 from English and three additional Danish ones), onto the bark of a beech tree. He chose a geometric sans-serif font family by Laurenz Brunner, “though as I used tracing paper to transfer the font on to the tree, it had already begun its first journey of change,” he says.

Then he stood back and watched. Over the next five years, he returned to the tree every year, to observe and document what had happened to his carvings.

What he found was fascinating. As the tree grew, it also healed its wounds and left scars, but not in a way that Karmann, 31, could have predicted. Instead of growing uniformly in all directions, as the bark of the tree expanded with time, so did width of the letters. It was like the tree had wielded a calligraphy pen of its own, thickening sides, thinning out edges, nearly obliterating the characteristic holes in its e, g, d, b, a, among others.

Karmann carried out this experiment in the beech forest in Ågård in central Denmark. It’s where he grew up and his parents still live. In fact, his parents planted the forest on grass fields over 20 years ago, and where he and his mother Ulla Karmann have created a few nature art installations.

Karmann started experimenting with time and typography while pursuing his Bachelor’s degree in communications design at the Kolding Design School. “I was interested in how you could use type as a tool to illustrate and express the elusiveness of time,” says Karmann who also has a Master’s from the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design.

In his spare time, he started making letters out of materials that would decay and disappear. Early experiments included snow, leaves and mushrooms. “They had a short transformation time from minutes to days. So naturally, I started wondering about years of slow natural transformations and decided on a tree in my parents’ forest.”

Artists and designers have long been using nature as a collaborator. Artist Hannah Fletcher collaborates with natural materials to explore how analog photography can be done sustainably. For instance, she used mushrooms to make a book on camera-less photography.

Regenerative artist Edward creates massive works on beach sand, only for it to be washed away when the tide comes in. The artist Simon Beck does something similar but with snow. Such pieces become even more relevant now, with as the human population deals with a worsening climate crisis.

Hannah Fletcher, founder of The Sustainable Darkroom, and “moist media” collective Akyute, both of whom experiment and collaborate with plants and organic matter in practices that integrate science, art, nature and technology.

For the next phase of this project, Karmann is working on numbers and symbols, which are missing from the current glyph set. He also wants to take it further to see how the morphing letters can help in the study of how plants heal and trees grow.