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Enjoy the online exhibition and catalogue of “Embodied Forest“, featuring Resplendent (2020) by Katie DeGroot.
The Singular Elegance of Trees: When we think of trees, we usually form an image of a perfectly pruned tree, balanced and symmetrical. In nature, those rarely exist. Trees are individuals. They grow to survive, becoming contortionists to get to sunlight and bowing to the will of other more giant trees. Trees grow in context to each other and their neighbors. I many ways, they are similar to us, part of a larger community whose specific environmental challenges form us as human beings.
My artwork begins by collecting fallen branches, festooned by lichens, moss, and mushrooms, and bringing them back to my studio. I work with individual branches and even larger tree trunks; they are my “muses.” I arrange them to interact, forming an ambiguous anthropomorphic story. Indeed, there is humor involved, as well as historical and contemporary art references. I hope to honor the beauty and individuality of trees even in their inevitable demise.
Published by ecoartspace. Edited by Patricia Watts. Design by Brett Yasko.
Embodied Forest is the ecoartspace 2021 online exhibition + book. One hundred and ninety-one ecoartspace members applied to the call for artists, and ninety were selected by guest juror Lilian Fraiji, curator of LABVERDE based in Manaus, Brazil. Countries represented by seventeen of the Embodied Forest artists outside the United States include Brazil, England, Sweden, Australia, Belgium, and Germany.
The range of topics addressed is vast, including wildfires, birds, logging, transpiration, mycorrhizal networks, canopy shyness, rights of nature, trees as witnesses of history, colonial and capitalist extraction/white supremacy, the sonification of trees, symbiotic relationships, tree as medicines, migrations of tree habitat, and Indigenous knowledge.
View the whole online exhibition here >