Conditions for an Unfinished Work of Mourning : Wretched Yew

These works form part of an ongoing, site-responsive series considering the potential of place and topography as harboring evidence of wounds and repair. I seek exchanges in territories and locations imbued with a certain heaviness – as a palpable weight generated by past occurrence or poetic resemblance. This phase of the project centers on the Taxus brevifolia genus of yew tree as a marker of endurance. Native to the Pacific Northwest forests throughout North America, where fires have become increasingly destructive in recent years, Pacific yew serves as a vital understory component to these ecosystems. Yet, in the 1990s, the tree was largely eradicated during indiscriminate harvesting after it was found to produce a plant alkaloid highly effective as a chemotherapy drug. A resilient species, scattered old growth yew remain and new saplings continue to emerge. Wretched Yew offers reverence for this tree as a marker of endurance. The project further connects its mythology as a symbol of death and regeneration to my own experience living in the region during a tumultuous time when the pervasive sight of clear cut hillsides served as the visual backdrop to personal struggles with addiction, depression, and loss. In-depth engagement with the cultural and ecological legacy of Pacific yew generated a provocative framework for thinking through ongoing cycles of neglect. Individual works in the series function as acknowledgement of the unsettled sorrow permeating these mental and physical spaces, operating as both elegy and specter. Drawing on conventions of photography and cinema as emblematic of archived experience, found and fabricated situations are traced, replicated and transformed into composite still and moving images. Deliberately varied in both aesthetic and material, multiple reproductive methods were incorporated. Photograms and film exposures of noted trees and their surround were produced over durational intervals using UV-sensitive processes. Resulting prints and collected ephemera were digitized and incorporated into video segments revealing the process of production, juxtaposed with studio footage of an improvisational recording session. In its fragmented forms, Wretched Yew purposefully unravels our collective understanding of the natural world – and by extension, our struggle to orient ourselves within a shared global space that is rapidly and repeatedly transforming. Making this endurance visible effectively situates ourselves in time and history, in an ever-elusive present that perpetually collides with the residue of the past. In this moment, as a productive way forward, I propose an embrace of radical despair. Acknowledgements: This project offers gratitude to all whose labor and knowledge contributed to the work, and to the original caretakers of the lands holding these trees – the many Indigenous nations and their descendants wrongfully dispossessed of their current and ancestral homes, some now living as members of the Confederated Tribes of Grande Ronde. LINK TO VIDEO: https://vimeo.com/339586118