Trees: Skin Deep

After growing up in Brooklyn, I spent a portion of my 20s homesteading in the woods of New Hampshire. At that time, trees were either utilitarian (think, firewood) or romantic (think Walden Pond). Now, living in Boston, I spend lots of time walking through urban woods. I am reconnecting in a deeper way to my earlier experiences with the natural world, in particular the slow, enigmatic, and tenacious energy of trees. In this project, I’ve focused close in on tree bark. It’s the outer layer and it’s my entry point to a vision of the lives of these common yet unique and alien life forms. Beyond the abstractions of skin-deep colors, textures and shapes, there are stories here to tell, embedded in the tree’s bark, about their lives and their interactions with human life, how they live, how they die. These images invite us to look closely at details that we might otherwise move passed quickly. We notice the evidence of their slow, relentless accommodation to human and natural interventions and the ways in which they live longer and at a slower pace than we do. There is unexpected and surprising beauty here, if we attend to it.