“When we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy.”
Herman Hesse
Artist Statement
Exhibition 2021 – Randal Studio, Brisbane Botanical Gardens, Mt Cootha
Childhood was a vast landscape of bush, brown earth, and blue skies.
The title of this exhibition ‘Whispering Tree’ (named after the She-oaks of childhood) filled silences as those long spindles of leaves moved in warm, dry, soft air. The sound of these trees was amazingly evocative. I guess I am fortunate to have had a childhood so close to nature and so free of adult supervision along with time to be singular!
For many, a natural strategy for surviving Covid in 2020 and 2021 was retreating to a place of safety. That place for me was connected to a spiritual peacefulness and grace amongst the trees.
To rediscover significant trees revealed how children observe the world and how connection to nature is for humans.
I began with strict observational drawings and then referenced sensory memories to those drawings and then developed a character….a small girl. Maybe this will become a story?
Significant trees had names or personalities as they like sentient entities, offered constant inspiration for the imagination.
They had and have a particular presence; I’m here and you are here and you belong.
Understanding of the aboriginal belief that the land owns us only became awareness at Art College when I could only comfortably draw the trees and land of where I came from.
Trees inhabit us and in turn we introduce our children to them so that they might have their own connection.
‘Vibrations in air’ according to DG Haskell,’ contained the measure and memory of a person’s life. To listen was therefore to learn what endures.
‘I turned my ear to trees ……. I found no heroes, no individuals around whom history pivots. Instead, living memories of trees, manifest in their songs, tell of life’s community, a net of relations. We humans belong within this conversation, as blood kin and incarnate members. To listen is therefore to hear our voices and those of our family….
Whispering Trees is dedicated to JAN THORPE-CROWLEY who passed away this year. I remember places we shared like the riverbanks of the Dawson, ‘The Junction’, and special places in national park lands ‘The Gorge’, ‘The Billabong’ and many forays to friend’s properties in central Queensland.
Janet Holmes 