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.

Jan Pittard© 2020