“The wilderness rose up to it, / And sprawled around, no longer wild.”  Wallace Stevens,

                                         from the poem, “Anecdote of the Jar”

 

“As I grow older / the cities spread / over the earth”, W.S. Merwin

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My current set of projects are focused on intimate, often overlooked encounters between the natural and the built environment that reflect larger questions around agency, instrumentality, and absorption. The work takes the micro view for considering larger, urgent conversations on the impacts and costs of human uses and abuses of the natural world. I have been taking photographs documenting interactions between the roots of large urban trees and the concrete/human-built structures that are intended to confine them. I pair these image series with texts, either as letterpress words printed directly onto the photograph or, as photographs of the actual letterpress type blocks collaged alongside. The texts function not as captions (though they relate to this tradition) but act as content that acts in parallel to the roots and human-built structures creating dialogues and tensions between layers of possible meanings/readings. These works are created as series to be shown in grids. The images become types or taxonomies depicting the array of human created armatures used to contain or perhaps to protect the trees. Each image is a kind of portrait of the push-pull relationship between the tree and the human created surround/barrier.  Over time, both the roots and the built structures are altered by the presence of the other.