About

The Uprooted Series
 

Loss is not absence but a marked presence, or rather a marking

that troubles the divide between absence and presence.

– Karen Bard.1

I developed this series of work thinking about the consequences of living in the Anthropocene; our living on a damaged planet. Being uprooted used to have as its primary reference the act of being removed, often forcefully, from one’s physical environment—the waves of refugees being a continuing and ubiquitous manifestation. Up-rootedness also has multiple, intersectional, emotional, psychological, and ecological, meanings that also call for comprehension.

The profound root-level interconnectedness of all life, now that it is under threat, is deeply astonishing, remarkable, and unsettling in its implications for how we are to live.

My method involves collecting tree roots, mostly salvaged from the burn pile of the town’s dump. Discarded as useless, the roots are cleaned, trimmed, and then painted gold. Gold has a long symbolic heritage that connotes more than just wealth. In Christian art, it represents light as well as purity and perfection. Across cultures, the metal is highly valued by the ancient Egyptians, and on across Africa, Asia, Europe, Oceania, and the Americas. Gold is thought to aid in healing, protection, growth, and knowledge. Covered then by whitish-grey wax the gold is “erased” with only traces remaining visible. Tips of the cut root ends are touched with red and bound with lead. Symbolically associated with death, lead is toxic. Mythologically it is also associated, however, with transformation and divination spells. The resulting pieces with the root ends inverted so that they now look like branches have multiple references and recognitions. They are ghost-like and may even recall a kind of chaos and vengeance in their Medusa-like allusions.

Some are mounted on chemistry stands, bringing the added dimension of “objective” clinical observation, experimentation, and dissection that has tended to dominate a good deal of the human approach to nature: being cold and dispassionate can no longer be considered virtues. This sense is emphasized by using the “scientific” language of Latin. Volsus (verb) has extracted, eradicated, rooted out, plucked, demolished, and uprooted among its meanings. The “Rx” used in medicine is also from Latin and means “recipe” and “to take.” The titles are thus a literal recognition of the reality of the roots “taken” from the ground and rendered as waste as part of the prevailing, capitalistic ideology of control and domination of nature. Yet, in this manifestation they haunt the viewer, troubling the divide between absence and presence. A prick to the conscience.