It’s Hard to Be a Tree

We are part of a thicket. The word is so good, isn’t it? It is a pleasure to say and conveys the exquisitely, infinitely, entangled way that all of us on this planet, we who are alive and depend on air and light and water, as well as beings in the natural world who are not alive in the same way, but equally part of the web, the thicket of our dynamic environment. This body of work originates in the thicket and at the intersection of art and nature. I worked to extend my senses to understand the experiences of a extra human natural world.

The work began at an artist residency in Swedish Lapland.  I practiced being permeable to the natural world, listening closely, sitting with rocks, being with branches and transpiring into the world around me. I spent hours in the woods, walking or being still. I was inspired, daunted, humbled by the vastness, and troubled by thdestruction created by unregulated clearcutting of the boreal forest. I worked every day in the brutalized landscape of a clear-cut, surrounded by the vastness of Sweden’s forests. I learned about clearcutting, its abuses, and how the land recovers, the interconnected systems of mycorrhizal networks, rehabilitating lichen and mosses, and the beautiful, generous birch–a pioneer species that is quick to repopulate damaged landscapes. They listened to me and comforted me, and I tried to live in tree time, and offer them my respect and attention.

The Swedish residency was intense emotionally, as I was there so soon after my husband’s death. I knew I was trying to escape my sadness, but I didn’t know how much the work was about grief until I returned home and started really working with the video and images that I shot. I felt my profound grief simultaneous with my grief from the destruction of the trees. Through the trees, I was able to start to understand the constancy of regrowth.

Back in Phoenix, I was fortunate to finish my work while a visiting artist at Ironwood Mills. There, using wood from trees downed by storms, disease, or age, I made structures to support the video monitors.