TELPERION
Huon Pine trinket case made for the international Year of the Tree
Made for the International Year of the Tree, Lueckenhausen fashioned this freestanding bench top jewellery case in solid Huon Pine with a consciously mythic theme that had been seeded through reading Tolkein, from whom he adopted the title. The trunk form opened to present carved shelves and each branch ended with a lidded seedpod trinket container. He now believes it to be foundational in the development of the perceptual-cognitive category of work he has gone on to develop. He had that work very much in mind when, years later, he began work on a Tiq (See under Ceremonial). Both, in their respective, even though iconographically different, ways, manifest as tree forms.
In Tolkien's fictional creation myth, he picked up on existing mythologies, linking all of his imaginative social constructs, languages and legends back to his academic studies. Actual Norse, and other, myths and legends and languages seeded his imagination. In a way he created his own, now world-famous, cognitive category in literature. In that creation story the two trees of Valinor are Telperion and Laurelin, the Silver Tree and the Gold Tree. They were destroyed but their last flower and fruit were made into the Moon and the Sun and so manifested as sources of light. Lueckenhausen adopted Telperion, the flowering silver tree of night, as the title to his work. Tolkien wrote:
et even as hope failed
Telperion bore at last upon a leafless bough one great flower of silver
.