Forest Whispers

Forest Family 2021 - paper pulp painting created during my residency at BigCi, Bilpin .

I love trees. I think I’ve been a closet tree hugger all my life. I used to love climbing them, but that was a long time ago. Now I appreciate their majesty, their sense of awe and magic. It’s as if they hold the secrets to life on earth. Where there are trees there are birds and underground cities of microorganisms doing their thing.

Trees could be our salvation as earth dwellers. If only humans would stop chopping them down.

I’m painstakingly aware of the precarious toe hold that trees have now on the planet, especially in the last fifty years when land clearing and tree felling has been taking place at ever increasing velocity.

According to Infoamazonia website up to 23.7 million hectares of forest may have been lost in the past five years. That’s a almost the size of the entire UK. It’s hard to imagine the scale of such destruction - it’s ecocide - mass destruction of the natural world.

This week I attended an artist talk for the exhibition Maps and Traces by artist Bronwyn Davies at Beaudesert, Scenic Rim. The artist talked about each of the trees she drew and the stories they told about place, colonisation and habitat destruction. One of her big focuses was on Takayna / Tarkine, the threatened cool-temperate rainforest region in northwest Tasmania.

This talk came fresh on the heels of the recent Dr Bob Brown talk at Murwillumbah where once again he urged people to take action in any way they can to stop native forest logging. I think of the way we have taken such living entities as trees for granted. That hubris of considering the earth and all its species as our right to plunder for profit.

When I undertook an artist residency at BigCi in Bilpin, it was immediately after the catastrophic fires of 2020. All around was evidence of the fires’ destruction, yet amidst it all were the bright orange leaves of gumtrees regenerating. Hope on the horizon. When I returned to finish the residency in 2021, the forest was already alive with growth, yet everywhere you could see the fire ravaged tree trunks and blackened remains of the trees which didn’t make it.

While at Bilpin, I created a series of forest paintings from coloured cotton clothing I had cut up and pulped in the Hollander beater. Some of the white cotton pulp contained ash and soot I had collected from the beach washed up on the tideline after the fires. If you look carefully at the images you can see the black soot and ash dotted in the white sky.

I think of these tree paintings as narratives of both destruction and regeneration. They remind me of how important it is to bear witness to what is happening around us everyday. To find something we are passionate about to focus on which deserves our attention and action. The forest is calling for help and I feel called to answer.

Trees of Bilpin trilogy 2021 - paper pulp paintings created during my residency at BigCi, Bilpin NSW.