Species of Trees

My recent tree images are part of an ongoing project entitled Species of Trees. Each image describes the shape and skeleton of a species of tree and also a view of a particular tree. The tree images are portraits as well as a feature of a landscape and a description of a tree species. These images make space visible, the area around the tree and also a sense of volume and mass. The images of trees are taken out of context and out of the pictorial frame whilst maintaining the descriptive elements such as space and depth which form an image. In 1771, landscape painter Alexander Cozens published a portfolio of prints entitled The Shape, Skeleton and Foliage of 32 Species of Trees for the use of Painting and Drawing. In this document the prints illustrate the visible character of various species of trees where each is illustrated as a generalised example and the work as a whole is one of classification. The description of particular tree species in my project Species of Trees acknowledges Cozen’s work of classification. Species of Trees is also the subject of a catalogue of text and images in 2013 with contributions from writer and critic, Ciara Healy and Poet, Tamar Yoseloff To mark a break in space: a transparency into everything. Ciara Healy. “The world is immense, constructed on no plan or theory which the intellect or man can grasp. It is transcendent everywhere.” William James. Whilst studying pre-historic rock art in the Badjelannda region of Northern Sweden, the archaeologists Ingra-Maria Mulk and Tim Bayliss-Smith (2007) found that some ancient nomadic societies believed topographical anomalies to be indicative of portals into Otherworlds. They discovered that any break in the homogeneity of space, such as a boulder or a tree with a special form, was considered to have symbolic value because it was indicative of a meaningful borderline. In the pre-historic conceptual sphere, such places were considered liminal and sacred because they were sites where the veil between this world and other possible worlds might be ‘Thin’. This ancient notion is relevant to David Harker’s delicate collection of drawings entitled Species of Trees, because they contain what Geraldine Finn (1992: 120) describes as a ‘space-between.’ The ‘space-between’ allows for the condition of possibility – where the rigid lines of rationalism converge with the lyrically intuitive and spacious nature of romantic thought. This confluence is made possible because Harker appropriated and poetically subverted Alexander Cozens 1771 publication The Shape, Skeleton and Foliage of 32 Species of Trees for the use of painting and drawing to create a more subjective and unique experience of what it means to exist. Trees, in both Eastern and Western pre-historic worlds were often invested with secret mythic powers, possibly because what we see of a tree above the surface of the earth in some cases, is mirrored exactly in form, shape and scale below the earth, where roots weave and curl their way down into the Underworld. There is evidence in many archaeological records that the notion of inversion between two worlds was widespread. It was believed that a bare tree in winter in this world, might be covered in spring blossom in the Underworld. Dr. Waddell (2013) describes how many communities used inversion in order to prepare their dead for their journey into the Underworld. In the famous Iron Age burial at Hochdorf for example, the dead Prince was buried with all the status symbols of the Hallstatt elite. However, his right shoe was on his left foot and vice versa. In such a ritualized context a mistake like this is unlikely. The reversal of shoes suggests that the Prince was deliberately prepared for the Otherworld journey to a mirror realm where all might be inverted. Reversed footwear is also present in Slavonic folklore – where, ‘Leshy’ or ‘Leshil’ wore their clothing back to front and shoes on the wrong feet. These creatures were considered to be spirits of the forest and they became active in the spring and died in the autumn, with the leaves on the trees among which they lived. We may never know what sort of powers were thought to be embedded in this parallel world, but the enormous amount of ritually-deposited material, often found around trees or where ancient forests once stood, suggests this world below was a major pre-occupation in many pre-historic lives. Looking at David Harker’s Species of Trees, we can see how these ideas would have been considered possible. This is because in each tree he creates, all time appears to be present: in the dappled shadows above the roots, in the rings beneath the bark, in the seeds amongst the leaves. The trees exist both in the empty spaces between Harker’s finely pointed marks and in the small lines themselves, echoing Ann Armbrecht’s (2011 : 188). beautiful suggestion that “Now is never then. Now is always now. Even then is now.” The nomadic tribes of Badjelannda, who crossed the tundra, mountains and ancient forests of Northern Sweden knew this long ago and Harker’s drawings remind us that we once knew it too. It is what William James (1985 : 53) called a belief in an unseen order; an understanding that our experience of the material world always exceeds every perception we have of it and every linear structure we attempt to impose on it. Species of Trees quietly show us that there is always a deep below everything, and it is our consciousness that feels its weight. It is a feeling William James (1985: 55) argued to be something you ‘absolutely know [to] be truer than any logic-chopping rationalistic talk, however clever, that may contradict it.” In between the branches and leaves that Harker has drawn, there is a rushing stream of other dreams, of half-finished sentences where things are totally other. For the globe of life, Virginia Woolf once suggested, far from being hard and cold to the touch, has walls of thinnest air. Ciara Healy 2013. Bibliography: ARMBRECHT, A. (2009). Thin places: a pilgrimage home. New York, Columbia University Press. FINN, G., in BERRY, P., & WERNICK, A. (1992). Shadow of spirit: postmodernism and religion. London: Routledge. JAMES, W., (1985). The varieties of religious experience. Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press. MULK, I. & BAYLISS-SMITH, T. (2007). Liminality, Rock Art and the Sami Sacred Landscape, Journal of Northern Studies 1-2 pp 95-122. WADDELL, J. (2013) The Caves at Rathcroghan in Co. Roscommon, Galway: NUI. WOOLF, V. (1931). The waves. New York, Harcourt, Brace and Co.