Tree "portraits" of individual trees, largely around the neighbourhood; some groups of trees on hillsides and some paintings with imagined tree-based imagery.
Tree branching patterns are both lovely and fascinating. Their importance to our neighbourhoods and our world is enormous, cooling cities, bringing water from the coasts inland in storms, providing habitat for countless other species, sequestering carbon and more. They function best in large natural forest communities.
Habitats: Forests and Oceans, Trees & Corals, Birds & Fish, Blue Sky & Blue Ocean
My Habitat Series is about forests and oceans as representative habitats (among many more) these being two that we tend to see and understand somewhat. So, water and skies, tree and coral shapes. The fish and birds are likewise intended to represent the thousands of species (animals, but also plants, microorganisms) that depend on those habitats. And because it's all linked and related and even communicating, I put the fish and birds everywhere - so exaggerating the connections a bit with fish in trees and birds in the oceans. :-) Using collage, a totally new experiment for me, seems appropriate for this particular series.
This is an installation that has been shown in multiple versions and more are in the works. The installation started with the invitation to the Tree Veneration Society (TVS) to do an installation piece for the Pebble Beach Arboretum in New South Wales. It was my idea to do tree roots between trees, gradually entangling. Happily, another member of the TVS knew how to create the work and got more members involved. Five of us created this piece, using vegetable dies on cotton strips which were then wrapped on rope and wire. It was in the arboretum, outdoors on the ground, between some trees, for the month of their Pearl Beach Arboretum Ephemeral Art Trail. The piece was modified and installed in the Chrissie Cotter Gallery in Sydney (2nd version, with dry leaves as the base and two large tree trunks and my "Entangled" painting) and is in the process of being changed to a vertical installation in the Coal Loader Centre for Sustainability as an (accepted) entry in the North Sydney Art Prize. It's also scheduled to be reinstalled in at least one other venue after that.
Concentration on the importance of tree roots and imagining their shapes led to this series and also the installations of "Beneath Our Feet," listed below. However, the tangles that started as tree roots have been seen by studio visitors as kelp, seaweed, long leaves and even branching in circulatory systems. So, they have become Branching Tangles found throughout nature. The paper "tangles" are made with cutout shapes of heavy paper and glue, mounted on 76 x 56 cm heavy watercolour paper with ink and charcoal as a background. These works can be seen as an underground tangle of colourful tree roots, seaweed in the water and more. There are five in the series now, three are flat to the paper and two are three dimensional with the tangles rising up off the paper.
