Broken Trees

Pencil on paper

The words below were included in the Human Nature group show held at 50 Arrow Gallery in 2025.

Broken Red Pine, Montague MA 2019, and Broken Eastern Hemlock, Ashfield MA, 2020 are pencil drawings made from photographs taken while out in the world.  They were born of a deep pain and grief I felt in the presence of majestic beings that were broken by intense micro bursts of wind. The environs are edited out of the photo so as to emphasize the felt experience of the tree. At the time these were made, this drawing practice offered me  the space to both face the hurt given and the healing that is possible from observing honestly and unflinchingly. 

Both these drawings were made in 2020 as my heart and mind’s tuning was beginning to change. They reflect a focus on the pain that I was most tuned into. I was stuck in a repetition-compulsion of expressing and exploring suffering and hurt. I looked for what was going wrong. Over time, I have honed my listening skills and, with the guidance of multiple conversation with other artists, books and essays on the interconnectedness of all beings, and in spending time with and in the more than human world, a shift in myself and as a result, in my art practice took place. I now work to open my sensing capacities in order to render the invisible energies and connections between us visible. All living kin are like bells – tone resonators. Through the process of NOT ignoring the images that come while sitting with another, I scribe the tones that aliveness is ringing. 

When I look at these drawings now, I know that a broken tree does not mark the end of the road. It is just one step in the cycles of reciprocity that the more-than-human world, when left to its own devices, is engaged in. The tree’s resources will move back down into the earth and be channeled to other trees that will reach upward and fill the gap in the forest’s canopy. These trees could become nursing trees for its surrounding family. I see that the grief I felt was wrapped up with the shame for the impact humans are having on Earth. What I also was expressing was MY loss, even though I thought I was conveying the tree’s loss.

It is interesting to me that I omitted the surrounding landscape. It expresses the unconscious bias I was holding as a White, Western person who was raised in a capitalist and individualist mindset that tends to focus mostly on the needs of the ego. So in the end, this drawing is about me, and how broken I felt as a result of disconnection from the whole. It is certainly messier to include the whole, but for aliveness and interconnectedness to be felt, I have come to see that it is helpful to not edit out the background.

That said, work that documents the pain and grief has its place. There is a lot that is not working on this planet because of human choices made, systems of oppression that have an intensely firm foothold in our psyches, and people with power who are not connected to the center within themselves. But it seems to me that it has to be accompanied with a more love centered and reciprocal intention. For these two drawings, I now see that my aim to focus on just the tree did not honor that Tree is not an individual, it is interbeing. The background is part of Tree. 

As I nose my way toward being one in the whole, my art practice has shifted away from documenting despair.