[gentle music] - [Mike] I carve a lot of different wood, but it feels completely different to carve these logs, knowing where they came from.

- [Reporter] The aftermath of Hurricane Helene still inflicting maximum pain on communities in North Carolina.

- [Reporter] One emergency official calls it biblical devastation.

- [Reporter] Some towns have made steady progress in their recovery.

In others, the scars are still visible.

- The sense that I get when I'm doing these sculptures is that I'm bringing happiness and life from a tragedy.

There is a lot of emotion tied up in it, and every single piece I'm doing has a lot of me in it.

Blood, sweat, tears.

If you look at my hands, there's blood in them sculptures too, but [laughs].

[hammer smacks] - There are many levels to this experience of making art with this wood.

Helene was a very impactful time for me and my family.

To turn disaster and tragedy into beauty, to create something that is evocative of the resilience of this Asheville community is very meaningful to me.

- When I tell people about Echoes, just right away they start telling their story about what happened.

It's like a therapy for people.

They just start opening up.

- Buncombe County commissioned this piece to serve as a lasting reminder that we are stronger than any obstacle we face.

- The resilience of the community is one of the reasons why I am just so proud to live in Asheville, and I think that's what sparked me to start Echoes of the Forest.

So this is the tree where it all began, and this is what my husband now calls the troublemaker.

[gentle music] Echoes of the Forest started after Hurricane Helene.

My husband and I were out for a walk and we saw this tree that was mangled and twisted.

I thought it looked like a teapot.

He thought it looked like a rooster.

And got my mind going and thinking, huh, wouldn't it be cool if we could actually create a trail of pieces of art made out of downed trees?

- When Echoes approached me, Liisa said that she wanted to do this project using the salvage wood from the hurricane.

It's like, I'm in.

You're taking something that's otherwise gonna rot or be discarded or burned in a fireplace, and you're making a piece of artwork that's gonna bring smiles to people's faces, you know, or making a memory out of it.

- I watched so many trucks driving around town, collecting trees and debris that fell during the storm, and I just couldn't help but think that a lot of these people have no idea the value of what they have behind their truck.

And so, to have Echoes of the Forest come along and give me the opportunity to create something beautiful with this beautiful log, there's so much beauty and character in it.

I was excited to be able to use it and for it to have all these layers of story behind it.

- We lost almost 40% of our forests up here.

So there's remnants of our forest and the projects that we're doing, these Echoes, hopefully will reflect, but also fill that loss.

[hammer pounds] - My name's Kwadwo Som-Pimpong, and I am a furniture maker in beautiful rural Clyde, North Carolina in the mountains.

My design philosophy has transformed over the years that I've been doing furniture making.

Initially, and I was really influenced by the mid-century modern, Scandinavian, straight lines, simplicity, all of that.

Over the years, I realized that something was missing in my work, and that was my culture.

My family is from Ghana, West Africa, which is a very important part of my upbringing and my life.

That eventually translated into sculptural work, work that incorporates the liveliness, the warmth of the Ghanaian artistry, along with that modern cleanness.

I found out about Echoes of the Forest through a woodworking friend of mine that decided to connect with the founder Liisa.

And eventually I was tapped to make an Echo as well.

This is a white oak log that fell during Hurricane Helene, and it's going to become a bench.

My wife was pregnant with our son and due at any moment when Helene hit.

No cell service, no electricity, no running water, [laughs] and I have pictures of my wife waddling with pieces of wood down to a place we'd found to set up a fire and cook.

Being able to work on a project that ties to our Helene experience feels really special.

So I'm trying to decide right now how much spacing between the seats.

And with something artistic like this, it just, it's a lot of feelings.

If it looks balanced, then I know I'm good to go.

This bench is inspired by a very unique and ancient tradition in Ghana, which is the carving of Ashanti stools.

And the stool has the significance of embodying the spirit of the tribe, the culture, the nation.

Connecting the African American experience to Ghana is very significant because Ghana was the first African nation to gain independence from a European colonizer.

And that process inspired a lot of the civil rights movement that happened here in the United States.

Now, this bench is going right outside of the YMI, which has great significance in African American culture here in Asheville.

There are just many connections there that are very significant.

I look forward to being able to tell my son about how I made a piece that is connected to his birth story.

His name is Dzidzo, which is my wife's language, Ewe in Ghana, and it means joy of the Lord.

And he's the most joyful baby that you will ever meet.

It's amazing for me to reflect on how I get to turn a horrible situation into a joyful experience, which is creating beauty out of the disaster.

[gentle music] [fire crackles] - Where are you from?

- Well, they call me Mountain Mike Ayers.

I live in Maggie Valley, North Carolina, chainsaw carver in the Smoky Mountains.

[saw whirs] [gentle music] As a chainsaw sculptor, I take a really rough tool and make elaborate art with it.

Rustic refined is what I call it most of the time.

15 years ago, my uncle and I had some land and we were building hunting cabins and he says, "I want a bear for my front porch.

Can you carve one?"

I said, "All right, well, I'll try."

So the first bear I carved, carved a five foot bear with no reference and went to go put it on his porch and the neighbor came over and said, "Hey, man, I love that bear.

Can I buy it?"

So I said, "I can make a living doing this."

The project I'm currently working on is called "Soccer Cub."

Cane Creek Park was the yard where they stored all the debris from the county, and if you'd seen the mountain of trash that was there, it's like 50 foot high, like 500 feet long pile of debris.

And they've cleaned all that up and they've put this soccer field park there, so this piece of artwork is gonna be for the grand reopening of this park.

So, I mean, the emotions I'm gonna describe with that, it's just, that's amazing.

So here we have "Soccer Cub."

I've already done the blockout work and the shaping.

So now I'm gonna take, and I'm gonna use the smaller detail saws and we're gonna do the furring texture to make it look like the ruffled coat of a bear.

And then I'm gonna come back and I'm gonna torch off that little bit of fuzz and then sand it, and that's the final steps before it gets sealed and painted.

After the storm, I went through a a dark period where I was like, I don't know what I'm gonna do.

I was looking at different pathways, am I gonna have to move?

And then it was like a sign.

All of a sudden, Echoes was here, and I was like, this is what I want to do with my life.

I want to do art that has a meaning.

And to me, that's the biggest value of it.

And I hope that people see that in each sculpture.

They're like, "This guy's putting a lot of heart into this."

[audience applauds] Hi, guys.

Welcome, welcome.

Thank you guys for coming out.

Liisa approached me about doing projects with Echoes, and at that time I had been affected by the storm too, with a lot of damage and it still gets me emotional with all the stuff that people have gone through in the community.

I'm proud to be a part of this project.

I'm proud to be able to bring light and joy with art.

This storm has brought us all together and shows how amazing our community is and how wonderful the people in the mountains here are.

And I hope you guys keep following the journey of Echoes of the Forest, support us.

They're helping lots of local artists and we're gonna try to bring joy to all the community that we can.

And with that, I want to unveil this project.

I hope you guys like this.

Thank you for coming out.

[audience applauds] - Every time we do an Echo unveiling, we invite the public and the community to come.

- [All] Three, two, one!

[audience applauds] - [Lisa] With the Echoes project specifically, it's all about healing, and a lot of the pieces that are being done are meant to be reflective.

- [Kwadwo] It's very important for people to remember that we need to care for one another, we need to love each other.

And doing public art is a way of really tapping into that humanity and helping us to remember what makes us human.

- I just wanna see the faces, like I like to stand back and see people's expression and see the artwork.

Every time they do an unveiling, just to see everybody's love and the excitement it brings, that's amazing.

And I hope we can keep doing this forever.

I don't know how much salvage timber we'll have from the storm forever, but we'll make it work.

[calm music] ♪ ♪ ♪