Woodworker Mark Noel of Hickory Corners has something odd sitting in a clear, glass box in his living room: A 550-foot-long wooden chain. It has nearly 2,000 individual links, all made from one giant silver maple tree from Noel’s father’s wood lot. The work took 3,000 hours and nearly a decade to complete, and its journey will reach a new destination later this month as part of ArtPrize in Grand Rapids.
It represents more than just hard work, though. For Noel, It’s a symbol of ten years of determination, love, tragedy, and persistence.
"You know, it took so much time and thought, that sometimes, I look at it and wonder, 'God, how could a guy even do that?'" Noel laughs. "Oh, well that was me, I guess!"
To understand how this piece came to be, let’s go back to 2002. That’s when Noel decided to sell his stake in Hickory Builders, the construction company he helped found back in 1989. He still loved working with wood. It was the new computers that tripped him up.
"I still don't have a computer," he says. "Very, very weak in that point. And the company could not expand past me. So it came to a point of either the company is going to stagnate, or I was going to have to step back and have them replace with someone a lot more computer savvy."
When he left the business, Noel wanted to get as far away from computers as he could. He decided to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather, who hand-carved gorgeous wooden chains back when Noel was a kid.
He wasn’t satisfied with any chain, though: Noel wanted to go big. Like record-setting big.
"I think every human being somehow longs for being unique or an individual or different," Noel says. "Doing something different or unusual or interesting."
You may not realize it, but carving requires careful mathematics. Once Noel found a large enough tree, he had to narrow it down to just the right size. Then he had to make little marks and outlines along the entire surface, so he could know exactly where to carve. That way, when he finished, all of the little links were interconnected, so you can’t pull them apart. No gaps. No gluing required.
Planning this took an entire winter. But once it was done, the process became a simple rhythm: drill, saw, carve.
It became comforting, Noel says. Especially when bad news poured in.
"It helped a lot when my wife was sick and she passed away, because you can't concentrate on anything except for the task at hand when you're working on this chain," Noel says. "...my wife was diagnosed with lung cancer. She passed away in 2003. Her funeral was on a Tuesday, and three days later, my best friend, he died of a massive heart attack in his wife's arms. So the domino effect was just cascading."
But the chain was there.
"I would go out in the winter when I was really lonely," he says. "And turn on the stereo. And I'd put on my headphones and dust mask. And concentrate on nothing else but the task at hand."
Noel continues: "It was an anchor chain, so to speak. But I think there's a lot to be said for having, you know, a thread of logic running through your life. A thread of continuity running through your life. I think everybody needs that. And this did give me something I could go back to. To relieve the concern and the anxiety and the loneliness."
The deaths made Noel consider his own mortality. And it made him look at his chain differently – as a kind of “chain of life,” as he calls it.
"So as I was carving this thing, I was thinking, 'Here I go. There's my first duck hunting trip with my dad. There's my driver's license, this part of the chain. There's my draft card, that part of the chain. Oh, there's that girlfriend.'
"And as I carved, I was thinking everybody, everybody carves their own chain. And everybody has the opportunity to make that chain light, airy, artistic, fun, whimsical, eccentric, or they can make it dark and heavy and cumbersome and hard to deal with. And I think that's your decision as you start carving your chain of life."
In 2009, Noel finished the project. He got his world record, inside the official Guinness Book of World Records.
But now, 15 years after he began, Noel talks about the achievement as a kind of afterthought. What he talks about now is how finishing the chain marked a kind of endpoint for all those hard times. Finishing let him move on.
"It's pretty tough to get your feet back on the ground after you lose your wife. You guys are a team, you make plans for the future. Well, now your team is dissolved. What's the plan?" he says. "So as all that stuff started clearing up, and I started finishing the chain, it all seemed to be like an ending point for that decade."
Noel hopes ArtPrize can be the place where he shows what went into this, and have it carry on after he's gone.
"So you can have this thing that's gonna outlive you," Noel says. "I think for some reason, there's something that floats in every human being's mind, is to leave something recognizable behind."
He’ll see the results of those decades of work when the piece is unveiled at ArtPrize on September 23rd.