Leaf/Land/Lung #3
$225
Carol Schwarzman
Inkjet print on cotton rag paper Edition 1/4
600 x 600mm unframed
2017
Description
Your trees may not function exactly as my trees do, and your forest might look different, but the underlying narrative is the same: forests matter at a more fundamental level than most of us realize.
– Peter Wohlleben in The Hidden Life of Trees
Organic shapes and patterns of the natural world impart the underlying structure of my work. I use shape and pattern to suggest immersion in nature and to reconnect the human with the nonhuman.
Both the Leaf/Land/Lung (2017) and Pattern Recognition (2018) series are made from works on paper imprinted with the leaves and trees of the Bimblebox Nature Refuge northwest of Alpha, Queensland.
A highpoint of Bimblebox is the very real experience of sleeping night after night under star-filled skies. The two series respond to the vast, all-over wash of stars seen above, suspended in inky black. Beautiful – yet terrible – otherness of the infinite can seem pattern-less to the human eye. However, the movement of the Universe, combining order and chaos, is simply too huge for us to see or, to comprehend.
These inkjet prints become visual images and textures replicating stars, coral reefs seen from above, or perhaps cross-sections of the human brain; the meandering lines of termite borings and cracks in the grain of a tree trunk now compose themselves into fragments of a larger landscape and hint at both micro- and macro- worlds.