Exploring the inner life of trees: Are they conscious beings?
A tree with magenta blossoms appears ready to burst out of the centre of ‘Red Bud Heartwood II’
DO TREES THINK? Do they feel?
Lorraine Roy, a Dundas textile artist, has thought about this.
“I feel we are only a short time away from proving they are conscious beings just waiting for us to awaken,” she tells me.
Roy’s art is appropriately rooted in images of trees.
Trees have dominated her textured and detailed landscapes.
In “Thinking in Circles: The Root Language of Trees,” an exhibition at Teresa Seaton Studio and Gallery, Roy tackles the arboreal cross-section. This allows her to reduce her composition to a circle filled with circles.
The simplicity of the composition, however, is balanced by the complexity of the meaning.
“This new work is my second series triggered by recent scientific research on tree-root communication,” she says.
“I worked with the circular form because it struck me as the most logical way to show how forest trees share resources and information through connections with their roots. This awakened my curiosity on how trees, as radial beings, might experience the world differently from us bilateral humans.”
In “Winter Heartwood,” a big irregular circle floats against a dark space. Circles of varying widths fill the inner space and stand for the tree’s age rings.
“The circular shape of a crosssection of trunk or branch is the ideal visual device to portray a tree’s various cycles and its marking of time, but also, I wondered, might it help us grasp its inherent consciousness?”
Roy enhances her image through quilting, appliqué, patchwork and machine stitching.
She draws attention to the age
rings by using fabrics of various colours and patterns. Embellishing each ring with machine stitching adds more patterns, some of which recall stylized leaves and tiny circles.
Five bare trees fill the centre. The trunks and branches are stitched with white thread on black, the roots with black thread on white.
“I tend to work in short suites of three to five pieces in different sizes,” Roy says. “I start with the smallest, where I can experi-
ment more freely, and use the results to build up to the largest.”
A tree with magenta blossoms appears ready to burst out of the centre of “Red Bud Heartwood II.” In both this and the previous piece, the cross-sections have gaps or cracks.
“In nature, nearly all old trees split in one or more places, especially when nearing the end of their lives,” Roy explains.
“These cracks fulfil vital functions in supporting other linked creatures like birds and small mammals. These imperfections are also beautiful because they record the long experience of a unique life.”
By comparison to the full circle compositions, “Communion 3” is more like a landscape.
A copse of flowering trees seems to be rooted in a curved ground line that might be part of the cross-section of a huge tree trunk.
A spiral sun glows gold above the trees.
“I never calculate how long it takes to do any of my work,” Roy says. “With this particular series as opposed to previous, I do very little sketching or planning, letting the form grow out of the markings in the fabric or my current inquiry or state of mind, so when it’s done, it seems like no time has passed at all.”
Regina Haggo, art historian, public speaker, curator and former professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, teaches at the Dundas Valley School of Art. dhaggo@thespec.com