Description of work

ONCE WAS A WOMAN

In this series I use turmeric and charcoal as paint.No chemical binders, I use acacia gum and my saliva. I drink the pigment and spit it onto the paper. Aboriginal artists used saliva as a binder for tens of thousands of years in rock art and bark painting.

Working with pyrography, burning marks into wood transports me to another time and think of when we humans made our first marks. I think about the trees and about wood in everyday life how we don't seem to connect wood to the once-living tree. This disconnect parallels meat eating and the once living animal, in turn enabling the atrocities of the slaughterhouse.

A pile of wood chips are chopped up remains of hundreds of elder trees that have been cut down around the city. When I pass by these mounds I feel quietened, like I am viewing a mass grave.

In the forest when a tree falls it becomes host to millions of organisms. In a tree's death, there is life. “The Nurse Log” shows the graceful and brutal magnificence of decay. Here in the city, we chop up fallen trees, package their remains for sale as wood chips or sweep it away.

“Until” and “Scaffold” my new works of pyrography, are done on wood that is found under every scaffold, all over the city. Note what beautiful strong old wood it is, you can count it’s rings on the side of each block. Trees hold up our city, enabling progress without us giving a thought to the long lives of those trees.

Trees can't walk, they can't run away, they don’t talk but they communicate. I relate to the tree, to its vulnerability and its strength

The title work of the series: “Once Was a Woman” is a fallen tree from Tomkins Square Park - it reminds me of my own body.

PERFORMANCE

"Under A Tree”

I make a turmeric and charcoal painting beneath the tree outside of WHITEBOX.