Speaking Trees

Foret Raciste:  An anti-racist installation in a popular, river-edge park, in 1998; funded by Heritage Canada.  19 trees featuring faces, ears + speech bubbles, “spoke” negative jokes, or cruel slurs, about other tree species.  Collaboration with playwright Vivienne Laxdal.  Curated by Annalee Adair.

Speech bubble says, “Stay away from those Elms, THEY carry disease.”
Speech bubble says, “This is a “whites only” tree
Speech bubble says, “There’s no way that any child of mine will grow up in a mixed-species nursery.”
The speech bubble was by a leader of the O O O, as if a Klan-type supremacy group existed in tree worlds.

Sensitive Understories: Curated by Linda Irvine for the City of Markham (ON), for Beaupré Park, where a forest-regeneration project was underway. Technically, “understory” refers to the delicate new growth under a forest canopy.

The park was in an area experiencing a few discomforting issues. Some residents understood the forest’s uncleared understory as the city’s failure to maintain their park; park structures had been vandalized; a recent teen murder at a nearby high school.
When I met with high school students on the Mayor’s task force, representing 23 nationalities, the troubling information shaped our creative process. Two key ideas arose: care + wanting to understand the backstories to recent activities. We chose iconic forms that could be suspended in the teenage trees at the forest’s edge.
Heart shapes bore the word, “Care” in 23 languages, including binary.
Brain shapes carried the phrase, “There’s got to be an important story under this.”
The students were happy to see their 23 languages as a central artistc feature, + agreed to get back to me quickly with exact translations; although some had to check with far-away grandparents.

The sudents and I knew that the small, lightweight signs might blow off the limbs + be carried away by the wind, or more than likely be stolen, + end up on people’s walls. We hopd for that. By the end of the summer, only a few heart + brain pieces were left on the teenage trees.