Project Description
IMAGE: Memory of a Thousand Seasons, 11″ X 11″ x 13″, Garry oak sawdust, found plastic tree fencing, 2025.
Across our region on southern Vancouver Island, new roads and construction sites are proliferating, placing ever-increasing pressure on the survival of the rare Garry oak tree species and ecosystem.
While walking and foraging for materials, I began collecting fragments of debris—orange plastic fencing—from around Garry oak trees in my neighbourhood.
I soon came upon a centuries-old tree that had lost a massive limb after nearby roadwork. The remnants of the large branch failure had been removed, leaving only mounds of sawdust—the powdered memory of a thousand seasons. I scooped the sawdust up with my hands.
Back in my studio, I followed my hybrid research method called Squirrealism—by first washing my hands. I then took three deep breaths to centre myself, and asked the Garry oak for permission to communicate using psychometry—the extra sensory perception using touch—to work with their matter. I immersed my bare hands in their sawdust and asked the tree: What is your greatest concern for survival?
The answer came as images—suffocation, division, containment mistaken for protection. I moved through the sawdust with other materials like orange fencing collected from the site and wondered whether the oak trees could “feel” the presence of plastic through altered microclimates, soil aeration, and mycorrhizal networks. Rather than contamination from plastic, the message seemed to be about communication and grid systems—of maintaining connection through imposed boundaries.
I began to see how the oak bark’s furrows resembled a Voronoi pattern or tessellation, each raised cell defined by fissures, echoing natural patterns for spacing and growth. The cells reminded me of ancient technology, and the aesthetic affect resembled a cell battery. Later, I learned that Garry oak bark contains calcium—essential for communication in both tree and human cellular systems, and batteries that employ calcium ions. Around this time, I observed that the airpots used at the Garry Oak Meadow Preservation Society nursery which echo this same principle—promoting aeration and root communication through open structures that foster branching and connection rather than confinement.
Interestingly, I have since learned that in wireless networks, Voronoi clustering improves communication—an unexpected echo of forest logic.
In this artwork, Memory of a Thousand Seasons, viewers can touch a 500-year-old piece of Garry oak bark (sustainably sourced by a certified arborist) set atop the rubbing together of foraged orange fencing and Garry oak sawdust from the branch failure of a different tree. I asked the two different trees if humans would be allowed to “feel” them in this interactive artwork. They were open, so I am excited to have the public to hover their hands above the Garry oak “battery” and see what images arise.
What questions will you ask? What do you sense this species needs to survive?
Through Squirrealism, psychometry, and interspecies listening, I’ve come to see art as a form of ecological translation—where intuition becomes method and materials become mediators.
Listening through touch re-centres relational ways of knowing and reminds us that communication—across species, systems, and scales—is the essence of survival.