For a while, I have been returning to and working with shed tree limbs. To me they have a quality that feels like an outstretched hand, a tuning device. Searching probes, piercing and entering the in-between time. Holding memories under their layers, tracing and mapping ebbs, flows, grief, nourishment, disease, floods, mycelial connections, spirits, siblings, ancestors; a distant and past grounding.
I have found tree limbs on walks to the town centre, in an emptied, rewilded sulphur mine, on the volcano in Catania, in corners of parks in Ipswich and Birmingham, next to the sea in Kent, and carried them with me.
In different ways, they encourage me to think about Christina Sharpe’s ‘In the Wake: On Blackness and Being’, Saidiya Hartman’s ‘Lose your Mother’ and Anna Tsing’s ’The Mushroom at the End of the World’.
Mas’, 2021
Location: Ipswich waterfront (for SPILL festival)
Materials: Octopus, tree branches, indigo powder, water, glass bottles, metal bowls, molasses, twine string
SPILL Festival of Performance 2021, Photos by Guido Mencari