Secrets of the forest revealed
Grimsby Public Art Gallery exhibit explores the life of trees
Life, death and rebirth. Big themes, indeed, and they reach far beyond the human and divine realms. Trees, too, undergo these fundamental changes.
Three artists — Floyd Elzinga, Liz Menard and Duane Nickerson — celebrate the resilience of trees in The Forest and the Trees, an illuminating exhibition at the Grimsby Public Art Gallery.
Through sculpture, installation, printmaking and painting, the three offer images of trees and parts of trees. These stand for the Canadian forest.
Elzinga, who lives in Beamsville, loves trees — and steel, especially its flexibility. He combines his two loves in the three over-lifesize sculptures of parts of trees in this exhibition.
Elzinga juxtaposes a natural form with an industrial material. We see a fragile shape that is naturalistic enough, but its colour, texture and strength come from steel.
Each sculpture stands for a part of the life cycle. “Fallen,” for instance, comprises a big leaf and stem, about four metres long, hanging from the ceiling. The leaf, curled but still whole, looks as though it is falling from the tree.
We are invited to imagine the huge maple this leaf came from.
“Rotting,” a sinuous leaf and stem about six metres long, lies on the gallery floor. The meshlike pattern of the leaf suggests disintegration is well underway. The stem is rough and rusty. The industrial material reflects the process of decay in nature.
“Scattered,” a two-metre-high pine cone, sits on the floor after it’s fallen from an evergreen tree. Coppery seeds lie on the ground, ready to spread.
Elzinga’s fallen cone combines the idea of nature’s death with new life and regeneration through the presence of the seeds.
Menard, a Toronto painter, printmaker and installation artist, also offers death and new life imagery in “What Lies Beneath.”
This low-lying rectangular floor installation consists of three layers. Bark chips fill the bottom layer. Dead, crisp and spotted leaves lie on the chips. A few white ghost or corpse plants (Monotropa uniflora) sprout among the leaves.
These unusual parasitic plants are born from dead trees. They feed on fungi, which feed in turn on decaying vegetative matter, typically on the forest floor.
Big surprise: the leaves and plants are not real. Menard fashioned them from handmade Japanese paper. She cut and printed the leaves, 1,500 of them, by hand.
Menard’s floor structure recalls an unmarked grave site, a place of death, and to some, a place of resurrection.
She fleshes out her imagery in “What the Forest Knows,” an accordion-style book she made. “Legend has it that the forest knows many secrets. Some lie buried in shallow, unmarked graves,” she writes. She also tells us that ghost plants “look like tiny people in mourning.”
Nickerson, who lives in Hamilton, focuses on trees in various states of seasonal change in his paintings. Each painting depicts a single tree, some in full leaf, others bare.
In “Willow Wind,” a tree in full leaf takes centre stage. It grows from wispy vertical lines and smudges that draw attention to the marks of the brush. The tree, in other words, is born from the artist’s hand.