What Have We Lost?
Three Leaches, Lakewood, CO
Three Leaches, Lakewood, CO
Three Leaches, Lakewood, CO
Three Leaches, Lakewood, CO
Three Leaches, Lakewood, CO
Three Leaches, Lakewood, CO
Three Leaches, Lakewood, CO
Materials: cottonwood (populus deltoides), brass, steel
Dimensions: 6 ft tall x 4 ft wide x 2 ft depth
Climate grief, like all grief, is a deep well of emotion, flowing between anger and sorrow and often leading to hopelessness or activism. Specifically, climate grief is the feeling of loss associated with the constant destruction of the planet and all the non-human life that suffers as a result of human intervention.
In my treatment of this tree, I realized I was not unlike a mortician; acknowledging the death, cleaning the corpse, dressing it up, and putting it on display for other people to grieve. I have intervened with the natural cycle of this cottonwood tree by removing it from its natural environment, where it could decompose into the soil.
The trunk, like a skeleton, has been erected onto a steel stand. The bark has been skinned from the skeleton and the wooden sinew which held the skin to the bone lays on the ground. All of the branches and twigs have been broken and re-articulated. The brass wire binds the elements of the cottonwood back to itself, but it also keeps each part separate, individual from the whole of what it once was. A cottonwood tree whose roots created viable soil out of sand for other plants to grow. A cottonwood tree whose species is dying because dams and drought prevent natural water cycles from reaching the tree’s offspring. I cannot undo what I have done, I cannot bring it back to life. Only now do I ask, “What have I lost?”
To read my related Thesis Paper, click “Through the Trials of Grief and “Becoming With” the Cottownood Tree: An Earth Story”