Fio Adamson
The wood for the trees
Encouraged to make a start, any start, I thought of connections between the ways trees relate to humans in the urban landscape, and made a drawing of trees layered with a collaged grid. It was like the grid of an urban map intertwined with roots and branches, like the roots that pop up through the pavement. I used travel magazine pages which provided an exotic air.
John Grade. Middle Fork.
I read The Secret Life of Trees (the key to humanity’s evolutionary life – and our future’)by Colin Tudge, and The Hidden Life of Trees (‘what they feel, how they communicate’) by Peter Wohlleben and began to notice the overground and underground connections between growing things, which are referred to by a number of artists. Examples are Ackroyd and Harvey's Ash to Ash, Edwina Fitzpatrick's The Tree Farm even John Grade's Middle Fork
Combinations of grids and wood appear in Orozco's Scaffolding for our Modern Ruins, and Tracey Emin's Helter Skelter.
My original plan had been to make connecting or almost connecting bridges, physical and metaphorical in the two years to come. I was being much too conservative!
I researched physical bridges when travelling, when out walking, when reading books or when browsing the internet. I sketched or photographed many, then spent much time in the wood workshop trying to fit together two pieces of oak. I hoped to learn welding to complete a design but was discouraged from continuing it as ‘too Anthony Caro’. Moving on from solid bridges was the first stage in my MFA journey.
The combined solidity and movement of an oak sculptures sent from an Auckland exhibition interested me, as did the contrasting shapes in Brancusi's Head For the Unit One show the oak I had worked on metamorphosed into Tendrils, a piece with animal heads sketched in the air by ribbon-covered wire. I was moving towards the animal world which then became my focus.
Ackroyd and Harvey Ash to Ash
Edwina Fitzpatrick. The Tree Farm.
Gabriel Orozco et al. Scaffolding for our Modern Ruins
Tracey Emin. Helter Skelter
Artist unknown (New Zealand)
Brancusi. Head