True Vine by Theodore Prescott

The Story Behind the Work

Theodore Prescott was invited to propose a new sculpture for Biola's campus, addressing the teachings of Jesus. Prescott chose John 15, where Christ tells his disciples, “I am the true vine.”

While visiting the proposed wall at Talbot East, Prescott found the same words he had already chosen from John 15, etched into a third-story window of the adjacent seminary building, and a structural channel dividing the tall white wall into four panels, forming a thin black cross. The starkness — white, black, and eventually red — recalled for Prescott the spare, iconic color logic of early modernist religious painting. His sculpture came to work with the space, emerging from that cruciform shape the way a living vine might grow through a trellis, or like veins and arteries recalling the costly yet live-giving nature of the way of Jesus.

The material also tells the story of the sculpture’s subject and location. Prescott has worked with apple tree limbs since 2008, harvesting thousands of feet of apple tree limbs, peeling and drying the wood, then sorting by thickness and character before beginning to build. Finding the right combination of branches for a single piece can take days — an intuitive, almost improvisational process of joining, carving and grinding until the seams disappear and the form reads as one continuous gesture. He found that this organic material, which retained some of its flaws in the final form, illustrated the details of Jesus’ teachings about gardening and pruning. The finished limb structure was cast in bronze for permanence, then painted in the sculpture's signature red.

Prescott’s reflection invites viewers to consider what it means to abide in Christ, our lives worked through the shape of the cross just as his bright red vine enters the building on one side of the cross-shaped intersection and out on the other. His hope is that the sculpture calls viewers to consider not just the easy parts of the Christian walk, but the hard ones as well, knowing that by the cross of Christ we find life.