Web of Life Installation
The Web of Life Installation was incubating in my mind for years. It began with wanting to create banners of tree prints on rice paper. A colleague in Taiwan sent the rice paper to me. My husband, Frank, and I carried this paper, printing ink and a 6 foot ladder, on hikes into the Gila National Forest, the Grand Teton National Park, and on kayak trips along lakes, to record tree patterns I saw over a two-year period. Working on this project I began to notice trees each have their own characteristic bark patterns, which are affected by exposure to insects, animals, fire, snow, rain, lightning, sun and wind. It was not until I started hanging the tree prints in my studio that the Stele Forest of Xi’an, China came to mind. There, rooms and gardens full of dark looming stone tablets, covered with calligraphy, memorializing the dead and the living in China, dwarfed me. The limited space in my studio was beginning to have that feeling, as I worked on 20, 8foot tree prints. My tree prints too, are memorials to the living and the dead. I encased the prints in encaustic medium to preserve them and made them translucent, which illuminated the patterns, ridges, and grooves from years of growth and wear on each tree. The venue of Turkey Vultures worked its way into my installation with a mountain lion kill of a doe in our arroyo.
