Ekphrasis - Tree Conversations
Poems written in response to the exhibition Conversations With Trees - networking with the world wide wood, Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, 8 February - 3 May 2020.
As
Above So Below - Nancy Tingey 2019 (pictured below)
Shiny
filaments of polyester
Static
yet sprouting
spindly
roots and branches
Fibre
from the techno-sphere
rendered
into an
exclamation
of grasses
Avian
sounds playing in the background
at
odds with these synthetic forms
woven,
meshed, bound
coiled,
spun, and splayed.
Neatly
wild
in
their perfect glossy blackness,
too
pristine
to
come from soil.
Jan
Pittard© 2020
Picnic
for the for the Trees - Dotti le
Sage
2020
Intercontinental
Picnic - Dotti le
Sage
2020
The
artist says she is illustrating
our
symbiotic, ceremonial and social connections with trees.
She
has superimposed images
of
classic vessels and bric-a-brac shop china
on
screen prints of plantation timber.
Strange
to see a picnic site
set
with genie bottles and Doultonware
Where
are our discarded soft drink bottles,
Maccas
wrappers and lethal plastic straws?
Have
they charred with the perished forest
in
the fires?
These
pictures remain.
Jan
Pittard© 2020
Peeling
Away Series I – V - Christine
Appleby
2018 (pictured above)
Calico
tinsel spirals
suspended
tubes and cylinders
dancing
threadbare weaves
Sheer
gossamer
with
copper sheen
Steely
filaments
fraying
strands
suspended
with wires
to
hold their billowing forms
Gallery
lights cast inevitable shadows,
less
subtle versions of your tactile selves
‘Coiling
shapes of peeling, falling bark’ says the artist...
Your
lustre is like no chalky gum tree surface I have seen;
you
belong to a submarine realm.
Buoyant,
adrift
insubstantial
Through
the camera
less
solid still,
strands
no longer distinct
blurs
of putty and saffron
like
imploding fungi
Improvisation
on a theme?
Interpretation
of a brief?
Word
on object.
Parasite
on parasite.
