Syllabary for a Natural World

Mark making. Symbols. These are some of the earliest efforts of human beings. This series, Syllabary for a Natural World, reaches back to prehistoric expressions of mark making to explore the innate complexity and language of the natural world, to restart a process of abstraction and understanding. Through photographs of everyday woodlands, by means of digital modification and mark making, I aim to recreate a language that never was, but which ought to be.

 It has been said that if we do not have a word for something, it is unacknowledged, hard to bring into consciousness as an actual thing in the world.

I examine the linear forms of tree trunk and branches, of leaf and stem, as they reframe themselves into an infinite set of almost repeating, but ever-changing patterns. The physical recording of years of growth and eons of evolved complexity, balanced and whole is visually palpable. And here the language arises.

May we bring the complexity and balance fully to consciousness.  May we develop a language as deep as nature itself.