Re-imagining an activity that could be considered an onerous chore, George Woollard has transformed tree maintenance into a fundamental step in his sculpting process and a source of virtually unlimited raw material.

Woollard and his wife, Jinja, live in a heavily forested area of Palolo Valley, not far from downtown Honolulu. Their property used to be a farm and includes an orchard of overgrown lychee trees. The branches continually break off and litter the grounds, and the trees need regular tending. As he continually pruned and picked up, though, Woollard also began to envision these organic objects as potential parts of his artistic identity.

A printmaker and a painter as well, Woollard started to experiment with sculpture and now considers his whimsical wood-based pieces a 3-D extension of his distinct style of expression. An exhibit of this sculptural work is being shown through Feb. 5 on the second-floor mezzanine of First Hawaiian Center, the tallest building in Hawaii. The center also features work by Tom Lieber, Hannah Day, Nelson Flack, Chenta Laury and Carl Jennings.

The name of Woollard’s exhibit, “Drawing a Bead,” refers to his increasing interest in sculpture and his focus upon it, including the dynamic possibilities it offers him that are distinctive from the 2-D plane he frequently has worked within.

Allison Wong, the Honolulu Museum of Art’s deputy director of administration and operations, curated this show as part of an ongoing partnership between the art museum and the business center. She said she has been following Woollard’s work through his prints and paintings for more than two decades and was intrigued by his recent turn toward sculpture.

“I love that his work looks like it’s about ready to tip, that there is movement and a kinetic energy built into them. They almost look like they are rocking,” she said. “And I appreciate that he’s working with a piece of found wood or a branch, and he can see something in those.”

Woollard moved to Oahu with his parents at the age of 14, in the early 1960s, when his father was hired to start a new geophysics institute at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He later earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art from UH-Manoa, where he met Jinja in the printmaking lab, and has taught throughout the UH system as well as in various classes at the Honolulu Museum of Art.

He and Jinja bought the Palolo Valley property 25 years ago, when it was an abandoned orchid farm, offering the couple ample land, a small cottage and a rustic and rusty two-story workshop. To make the finances work, and to help sustain their careers as full-time artists, the couple rented out the cottage and camped in the workshop, which was without water or power. It also leaked when it rained and had attracted numerous rats.

“It was stressful. It was an adventure, like a frontier thing,” Woollard recalled. “But we could see that the place offered us the chance to have a wonderful studio. … We are both passionate about art. We wanted to be artists. It wasn’t a question of if we were going to do it or not. There was no question that we had to do it.”

They spent about five years getting the workshop habitable and since have built an additional house on the property, allowing them to devote the studio to its intended purpose. Integrating his livelihood even more with the place, Woollard gathers his sculptural materials just outside the workshop, which, he said, connects him “to the spirit and the mana. … It makes me feel very Hawaiian, in a nonracial way, in a sense of belonging to the land.”

In turn, he said, this show is about the symbiotic relationships he has developed with the process, the materials and the place.

“I feel like some kind of scientist, looking at the same thing from different angles and in different ways, as a process of finding the internal truth of things,” he said. “There’s something hidden in each branch — big ones, thin ones, little ones. They are evocative of something, something not ready-made. I just see the potential in them, and the beginning of something.”