Wrap Artist : Wildfires: A hillside sculpture carries a message about regenerating the ravaged land.

Armed with a bundle of heavy-duty plastic wrap, a hair dryer and a couple of high-powered heat guns, artist Marcus Lutyens set out to make a symbolic gesture concerning last month’s deadly wildfires.

*

So before sunrise earlier this week, Lutyens went to the fire-scarred canyon where arson investigators believe a Nov. 2 blaze was intentionally set, to fashion a sculpture out of the plastic wrap and the burned husk of a 22-foot-high oak tree.

First, he covered the tree in plastic. Then, in a process that took several hours, he used the heat guns and blow dryer to form-fit the plastic around the tree--his version of shrink-wrapping.

The finished piece, which he calls “Treeson Sculpture”--combining tree and arson --is the kind of merger between the artificial and the natural that he said will be necessary for the land to regenerate and houses to be rebuilt.

“The plastic is like a womb, there to protect and nurture the tree and keep it safe from future harm,” he said of the post-apocalyptic sculpture. “Nature can’t heal by itself. For better or worse, people have to become involved.”

Pausing, he added: “This is the site of incredible destruction. And they think that the cause was human destruction. So in a way, this is a human response to human aggression. It’s a symbolic effort.”

Lutyens, 29, is serious about this.

He has sunk $800 of his savings into the piece--most of it to rent a gas generator to power the heat guns. In exchange for 10,000 square feet of plastic, he swapped one of his pieces of art.

Just don’t call him Christo, another artist who incorporates nature into his work and who in 1991 planted hundreds of bright yellow umbrellas along the Tejon Pass to mirror a similar number of blue ones placed in Japan.

“He puts artificial objects in nature while I work with the natural object itself,” Lutyens said. “Actually, it’s quite different.”

For “Treeson Sculpture,” Lutyens chose a barren hillside just off Old Topanga Canyon Road. The spot is only a few hundred meters from where the fire first rolled over the eucalyptus and old oaks of the canyon as if they were kindling. Also destroyed were many of the area’s homes and whatever animal life had existed there.

The idea, Lutyens said, was to create something using both natural and manufactured objects to draw attention to the capacity of people and nature to work in concert to restore the area to its former beauty.

“I’m very interested in the possibility of rebirth,” he said. “And with all the technological advancements, the marrying of the artificial and the natural is unavoidable.”

While Lutyens has a social science degree from the University of Edinburgh in his native Scotland, he has no formal art training. Still, he is fresh from a one-man exhibition put on by his Melrose Avenue art gallery. And his boss, who surveyed his work as he put it up in the rain this week, was impressed.

“Isn’t this just incredible, beautiful,” said Joni Gordon, owner of Newspace Gallery. “One of things I like best about his work is that he is able to combine things that make you think with things that are pleasing to the eye.”

Lutyens, who battled wind and rain all week as he tried to finish, said the sculpture is functional as well as symbolic. Although the tree he picked appears well beyond saving, he said the plastic wrap around it acts like a greenhouse--providing warmth and moisture through water particles, which collect on the inside of the plastic sheeting.

Additionally, in the knots tied in the plastic to keep it together, he sees so many umbilical cords. And the tree itself? A representation of humankind’s troubled family tree.