29 May Bhutan Cypress

Cupressus Torulosa, 2020. St. David’s Park, Hobart

The tree was familiar to me in its foreignness. The cypress is evergreen, a mournful tree, associated with death and funerals and Pluto/Hades, the God of the Underworld. It’s also linked to Artemis, Aphrodite and Hecate, the Arc and the Cross. Dead bodies were enveloped in its fronds and mummies housed within heavy cypress wood coffins. Eventually it did infiltrate my loungeroom. Soaking cones formed a thick sticky resin, sweet and headachy and its boiled needles became an ink.

The particular, singular instance of this specific cypress tree presses in and on me from the park. From the balcony, and as my own unease grew in isolation, the tree began encroaching on my space. I was drawn closer to it as day after day passed with it looming over my lounge room. Given the circumstances, this one tree became a landscape and like any landscape, as I returned to it, a dialogue emerged. The process has been recursive, the tree itself evolves and reflects on the artworks I am making, changing how I then look back at the tree.

The tree sits with me through this project. The tree tells a multitude of stories and is a place to reflect (in both the sense of doubling back and to think on) my own memories and emotions and the experience of landscape. In its branches hang stories and connections, like a Rorschach test for my own experience of itself.