BranchOut: Yard Tree Collaborations
These artworks are a series of collaborations with trees in my Denver yard, in individual responses to prompts agreed upon by our horizontal, feminist, interdisciplinary research group BranchOut. The group then met across two residencies in Utah to explore performative ways to engage with the Pando aspen clone.
Prompt 1- Visual: “Drawing with trees“
Click “play” to see the gif made in collaboration with trees:
4 yard trees are collaborative agents who do the drawing – what marks do the trees make? I am interested in the embodiment of the tree as artist and how this changes our role as humans, observers, audience members.
The drawing tools are clipped to a branch and contact paper surfaces below. Changes in wind speed and direction influence the images. Photos of the process below:
Prompt 2 – Sound: “The Living-Together of Tree Mentions”
The audio above references Donna Haraway’s idea of entanglement, combining each mention of a tree from the books of poetry on my home shelf. The mentions are ordered based on their page number in the original publication.
I’m interested in exploring trees existing outside of the context of a forest, the trees we literally live with, in our literature, in our homes, in our mental spaces. The text accompanying the audio is below:
Do humans need to name parts of trees after parts of our own bodies to understand them?
Prompt 3 – Movement: “Cheers with a Yard Tree”
In this movement work I attempt to cheers with my yard tree, based on the amount of monthly watering recommended by Colorado State Forest Service and Denver Water.
I divided this into a daily amount (based on this tree’s circumference, about 20 liters per day!) I did not end up drinking this much water in one cheers but did drink 1/20 of the tree’s intake. I liked trying to understand the “thirst” of a tree via my own body, and it got kind of uncomfortable pretty quickly. There are a few video stills here:
Work group members: Alison Dobbins, Alexis Bacon, Eleanor Siler, Hailey Becker (Michigan State University); Kori Wakamatsu (Brigham Young University); Megan Heeres (City of Henderson, Nevada); Alyssa Ridder and Anne Yoncha (Metropolitan State University of Denver)