On Tuesday Oct. 27, Gina Siepel presented her work-in-progress environmental arts project, “To Understand a Tree.” The virtual event was hosted by Joanne Benkley, the chair of the Environmental Concentration, and sponsored by the Smith College Arts Afield Program along with the Kestrel Land Trust.
For the last two years, Siepel has been spending most of her days in the woods at the MacLeish Field Station studying the forest, searching for a deeper connection with one particular tree. She hopes that her project will forge a new ecological consciousness and allow her deeper insight into the life of a tree.
Siepel is a woodworker based in the Pioneer Valley. She has spent a considerable amount of time studying early colonial furniture making and is interested in the intersection between material, design, craft, gender and history. She has worked in the Amherst Theater department designing performance sets, as well as the Mount Holyoke Studio Art Department. Her art has been exhibited in galleries across the local area. Many of her works involve large wooden installations in which the construction is a part of the piece itself.
Her latest project is a study of the material from which much of her art work originates. Through this project, she asks, how does having a relationship with a tree change the woodworking process once the tree has been cut down? Inspired by American contemporary artists like Richard Serra, Siepel prioritizes the medium and the process, searching for truth in the material itself.
Working with a team of ecologists, Siepel has learned about the ecosystems surrounding her tree of study. She has begun to realize that each individual tree cannot be separated; each one is inherently connected to the other and the surrounding wildlife. Yet each tree retains unique features that can be seen with closer observation. Learning from the trained eye of an arborist, Siepel began to notice the subtleties in the tree’s bark that indicated knots in the wood below the topical layer. This intimate attention to detail evolved over time. As she grew more attuned to the wildlife, Siepel noticed when particular birds came to visit the tree and when they were no longer present, and how the lighting changed in the forest with the passage of hours. Focusing on the minutiae of the surrounding wildlife enriched Siepels experience of the tree she studied.
Part of her project has focused on daily documentation. Every day for a year, she went to the site and recorded a video. Siepel expressed her excitement over how extraordinary it is to see the forest dramatically change over time. In the summer months it is a vibrant emerald, in the winter a dusty brown. Siepel began to think about the time frame of the forest when compared to her own life. The forest exists on a scale much larger than a human can ever conceptualize. It is constantly in flux, perpetually changing. Siepel came to focus on the ways in which even the human perspective of death as a binary phenomenon erodes in the forest. Parts of a tree can be both alive and decaying at the same time. A fungus can grow on a plant that has died. Organisms on a large and small scale are cycling through existence in a way we cannot comprehend.
There is a fascinating mystery to the life of trees. Is it possible to understand something that is fundamentally beyond ourselves? Is it possible to truly appreciate the material that supports the day to day functioning of much of our lives? Siepel looks critically at these questions in hopes that piecing through them will enable us to live more thoughtfully, with a newfound awareness of the source of our furniture, paper and constructed environment.
In a time in which the human world appears to be dissolving into chaos, it is a humbling reminder that the world is much larger than the ones humans have built. All around us, forests continue to grow. Leaves continue to convert sunlight into energy. Trees continue to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen. The world pushes on, continuing long after our own life spans, changing form and shape and size. Perhaps we should all strive to learn more from the quiet contemplation of trees, how they coexist peacefully — better as a unified forest than as individual separate entities. Siepel’s driving question is “what is a community of a tree?” She has found that a tree’s community consists of many things, the earth, the birds, microbacteria, sunlight, though most importantly, she found that a tree’s community exists of other trees. In a world in which we all feel isolated — pulled apart politically and physically — perhaps we should focus on the ways in which we are still connected to one another, not unlike a community of trees.
For more information, or to view the Gina Siepel’s photography of the MacLeish Field Station and other works, visit her website https://www.ginasiepel.com
