Hello, welcome to the sixth digest from the Forest Portal 🌱
A place for sharing occasional updates and musings on the growing project ‘Conversations with the Forest’.
I have been trying to figure out how to write about this loss, thinking about the ghosts of trees gone, the poison injected into root systems. I have felt a heavy melancholy these past few months, unable to comprehend the losses that we are experiencing in the human and the more-than-human world, shutting down, escaping into distractions, ignoring the anger, letting it wrap claws around my insides. Some weeks ago a friend sent me an image and a location pin-drop of a big cut-up tree, sculptural, haunting, beautiful and devastating against the sky and the skyscrapers. Limbs reaching into air, cut off mid-way, little poison holes, sap seeping.
I went to visit the site to see if I knew the tree, as soon as I arrived at the pin-drop location I remembered this big fig tree was one of the first trees I spent time with during the early developments of the Conversations with the Forest project.
I wandered through the now cut-up root systems of this huge fig tree, remembering walking underneath it shaded by reaching branches, a thick layer of leaves on the ground and squawking birds above me. Now cut off, raked up and silent.
Floating limbs left hacked into wreckage, sprouts attempting to come back to life, poison pricks shot deep into the core, the sun baring down on my shoulders.
This one singular big fig tree on a huge block, who has lived here so much longer than I have, now gone... I am thinking about what other options we can imagine, how we might integrate these old trees into the city constantly growing around us. Maybe the new development is built around the tree, creating a central space for meeting each other, a place to sit with your morning coffee, or maybe this big old tree is removed and replanted somewhere nearby, maybe instead of another development we replant some of the old forest. Why is it that we reach for poison as the first option?
The irony is that the site where it has been cut down will be replaced with an apartment marketing itself as “Paradise Found”…
I listened to this podcast a few days ago with Perdita Finn she speaks a lot about our responsibility to our future selves, of ideas around rebirth and how the way we are treating the earth and each other will be reflected back onto us in the lives of our future selves. It made a lot of sense to me and maybe it will make sense to you too. More than anything it’s a gentle reminder to treat others with kindness, human or other beings. I’ve linked the podcast below.
Take note of the old trees in your neighbourhood, remember them, love them, protect them.
The ‘Conversations with the Forest’ Studio at 10 Beach Rd, Surfers Paradise, is open by appointment - shoot me an email or message and come say hi.
You can also continue to write letters to the forest at the link here:
In process this week:
📖 Reading: ‘The Stuff of Life’, Timothy Morton
👂 Listening: PERDITA FINN on the Long Story of Our Souls
🌱 Propagating: Brown Kurrajong, Lacebark, Rusty Fig, Native Ginger
❓ Asking: Who’s future are we living in?
🚀 Other current/upcoming projects: I will spend 6 weeks in a research residency with MAP in Christchurch Aotearoa in Jan/Feb, MIAMI/MIAMI summer exhibition is coming in early 2024 more details soon and the Carbon Dating project of which I am a participating artist will go on a regional tour from March 2024.
Paradise Lost!!