A high-school career-aptitude test predicted that Emilie Benes Brzezinski ’53 would become a mechanic—an idea less outlandish than it sounds. Though she has never worked on engines, the 82-year-old artist knows her way around power tools, including chain saws, which she uses to create massive sculptures out of wood.

Brzezinski has been sculpting since the 1970s, first in plastics, latex, and wood fiber and then, beginning in the 1990s, using fallen tree trunks and other found wood. While her work appears in collections and has been shown regularly in Europe and in the United States, a confluence of events this year is raising her profile. In May, a monograph of her career was published, The Lure of the Forest: Sculpture 1979–2013. In August, a Spanish museum agreed to purchase her installation Family Trees: A Hide and Seek Story. And in September, her solo exhibition opened at the Kreeger Museum in Washington. Now, in her eighth decade, Brzezinski is coming into her own.

As part of a prominent Washington family (she’s married to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security advisor to President Carter), she spent the late 1970s juggling her art career with the raising of three young children and her husband’s schedule. It was not uncommon for her to dash from track meets to state dinners with stray flecks of sawdust in her hair. Today, her two sons are active in law and diplomacy, and her daughter is a co-host on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

Born into an exiled Czech political family (her father was a diplomat and her great-uncle was president of Czechoslovakia), Brzezinski felt a sense of rootlessness during her California childhood. She has always been drawn to trees, viewing them as having structures and characteristics akin to those of humans. “To the casual observer, a tree is vertical and straight. But on careful study, most trunks have a basic movement, what I call the essential gesture,” she says. “I am always amazed at the parallels between human gesture and the gesture of a tree.”

Brzezinski takes this likeness a step further in Family Trees, an installation comprising 14 hollowed-out tree trunks, each embedded with a life-size photographic portrait of a family member—husband, children, and grandchildren. The artist includes herself in the group; the photograph above shows her with her hand raised, shading her eyes as if she is searching for something. “I am looking for my family,” she explains. “I didn’t really know who I was, or where I belonged, until I had children, and now grandchildren, in America. They helped me feel I belonged here.”

The Lure of the Forest is open at the Kreeger Museum in Washington until Dec. 27.