Bark Drawings

 

The flesh of my palm presses firmly against a tree’s bark sensing the ridges pushing back. A 6B pencil traces this memory of touch, marking time – time innate to the growth of trees as water and nutrients travel through its trunk’s vascular system, tree rings a visual of its growth.

 

The Bark Drawings are a series of mural-sized works depicting major species of coniferous trees within our coastal temperate rainforest – Douglas fir, Western hemlock, Sitka spruce, Western red cedar. With changes in global climate niches, the make up of these forests is altering, the Western red cedar already showing signs of decline from repetitive droughts. 

 

As when experiencing individual tall conifers in close proximity, the Bark Drawings relate to a bodily awareness, to one’s own as well as to the other. Texture and pattern is abstracted and in subtle ways repeats itself, retaining the unique markings of a hand or of nature.