Converser en bouleau: des expressions phénologiques: 28 septembre au Centre Culturel de l’Université de Sherbrooke
evolving questions with birch
Generating skills to go hors-piste
Capturing the knowledge of birch
Working on and with birch bark, a conversation is created with so many others.
This practice begins in the forest, collecting the bark, and allowing the drawing to emerge through the various growth patterns found on the birch. The drawings are made with charcoal made from the birch branches as well as other participants such as the lichen that can be seen on its surface, the dots pierced by insects, and the lines created by lenticel.
In what ways can the drawing explore and/or transgress the boundaries between humans and other life forms?
Drawing on birch bark activates a dialogue with all its processes and opens our memory to its cycles of growth and transition. The tree is part of a network of signals in which it participates fully throughout the seasons to initiate several processes that lead, for example, from dormancy to leaf blossoming and from pollen formation to seed dispersal.
These signals are synchronized with the opening of cocoons, the activation of lichens, the arrival of birds, insects and animals and in parallel with changes in human activities. Working on the bark activates a dialogue with all these processes and can reflect our rhythm of creation and dormancy.
pheno-birch visioning cards
I am working on the material of birch bark to create a set of 25 picture cards about 5x7 inches each.
The phenology of plants includes the periodic events in their biological life cycles and how these are influenced by seasonal variations in climate. These observations in nature's calendar have evolved as social rituals and have become elements of the cultures around the world.
Pheno in Greek means to show, to bring to light, to make appear which is close to what I would like to do with the cards ; to draw the many traits of birch onto the birch cards while also reflecting on the affects climate change is having on them.
An introduction to the phenology of birch through the research of smart forest came through an invitation to participate in Gisèle Trudels Orée des bois, the second event of her five year Chair project ; Ecotechnologies of Practice and Climate Change*
In this first in-situ presentation I met with small groups and presented the cards, exchanging more particularly on the cards that became activated according to each person. At the end of each session, a new card was suggested by participants and in this way they influence the continued development of the cards as they travel to different places and encounter a variety of audiences. Travelling storytellers who used picture cards to bring news of events and collective stories dates back to earliest times and it is this tradition which appeals to me for these times. Person to person dialogue around our symbiotic relationship with trees is a strengthening practice as we consider how to act upon climate change.
Drawing, carving, peeling into and onto the surface of birch bark harvested from fallen trees has given me contact with the extraordinary surface, layers, colours and textures of birch, it is an excellent work surface used for many applications. Above all each piece of birch is a generous offering from the tree and is so full of possibilities that the drawing often emerges from its surface rather than being drawn onto it.
This project is ongoing and will be presented at the The Center for Forest Studies on the 28 of September as part of Gisèle Trudel 's chair group
As part of the group events I offered during the exhibition why do you never speak we hired a bus to take us to the Dungeness B nuclear power plant in Kent, UK for a tour where we had to go through a security checks 6 weeks prior to our visit and on arrival. We dressed up to look lik what now Shanghai police look like in covid time, anonymous figures in PPE equipment following incredibly strict security protocols. Our tours guides followed a script to enlighten us to the wonders of nuclear power while clearly avoiding the subject of nuclear waste. After our tour was over we went to a nearby woodland to decompress and relate to one another how we had individually perceived that extreme experience. Once we entered we became their subjects, our movements, ability to engage in discussion were very limited. We listened to birds, looked at mosses, were silent.
About the Jack Pine
38"x50"
L'atelier Daigneault-Schofield, July-September 2021
These drawings concentrate on the roots of a jack pine and of other pines who will have less chances at adaptation. While drawing I have a sense of being deep in the soil spaces between the roots and their microbiome. The roots advance and extend in wave forms through the soil, anchoring and hydrating the tree. I follow these lines like a conduit imagining the sensing of soil moisture, the acclimation of roots and a physiological threshold that can lead to their death from the effects of water stress.
In dialogue with postdoctoral research fellow Dr. Jehova Lourenço Jr
Département des sciences biologiques
Centre d'études de la forêt
Jehova. It looks like the dynamism of how species respond to the environmental constraints is key to understanding their strengths and weaknesses. This "continuum" is captured by the network analysis, where the interaction between the components in the system is fundamental to giving clues regarding the system functioning.
Susan: How are we listening as a society? What are the "traits" we have to make the right or wrong choices with regards to trait centrality and the strength of correlation in the cells of trees which are adapting and those which are not.
Jehova: Very interesting! I like this idea. Ultimately, the traits (or attributes) we have given more importance to, or that are more central, seems to reflect the choices we have made and define the status quo of our society. Plant traits and centrality is the outcome of natural selection acting on plants. The hydraulic designs are just like lapitated diamonds. Jack pine, balsam fir, black spruce... and thousands more have strived over time. But what about us? What has been central for our society? Do these influences repair or destroy our social networks?
Susan: It seems that if you looks to indigenous cultures around the world their adaptations to the land they inhabited/inhabit were largely very successful.
If we look around us now, outside of these cultures, our attention to our environment, the state of the soil, the air and of the water that nourishes all beings, it is clear that the/our predominant trait centrality does not support population survival..What trait centrality will need to become visible if we are to survive?
A cell being the smallest unit of a living thing is the basic building block of all organisms, the health of the community of trees, the individual tree, as you say begins with the health of the cell.
Your research indicates that the hydraulics of the cellular structure of the jack pine is advanced for its survival in a drying climate. It can plug water very successfully, so with drying soils it is able to still power water up to the leaves by funnelling the water through a smaller amount of channels rather than loosing the momentum part way up through several channels as is the case in other pines.
Looking at the cells of the jack pine is like looking at an inspiring diagram for future survival but its hydraulic design is not shared by other pines who will struggle to survive.
How quickly can trait centrality be adapted?
Susan : Two major factors influence the rate of water flow from the SOIL to the ROOTS: the HYDRAULIC CONDUCTIVITY of the soil and the STRENGTH OF THE PRESSURE GRADIENT .
Therefore, the more degraded and dry the soil is the harder it is for it to be a good CONDUCTOR resulting in the weakening of the cells.
Jehova: Yes. If the soil degradation impacts water and nutrient availability, this is very challenging for plants, which requires high versatility to cope with these several environmental stressors.
Susan: Maybe as the jack pine often grows in poor soil it has developed better water conservation ?
Jehova: Yes. I think jack pine evolved a high capacity to grow in contrasting environments, likely challenging for other species.
Over Christmas while in Toronto I met an inspiring anthropologist who has been working through film, dance, community work, and documentary photography at critically questioning the approach the cities urban forestry department is taking in re-modelling and preserving the parks oak Savanah. Oak Savanahs, I learn, are the result of hundreds of years of human intervention to make spaces of food growing, cultural exchange and ritual. They are indigenous spaces that when encountered by colonisers were seen as a replication of the green and promised lands left in Britain and were often chosen as places to practice european farming which included destroying the Savanah's by removing the oaks.
In high park the centuries long indigenous practices that formed this space, have not, as of yet, been recognized and the city approaches the protection of this space through software based modelling practices. One can visualise all the unwanted plants and bushes highlighted with the code 'destruction through roundup'. Humans, birds, soil, berries, insects, plants feeding and breathing through the glyphosate conduits can become seriously ill.
Where is the listening?
Savanah are regenerated through burning, an indigenous practice. The city practices the fire without practicing communication with indigenous members actively using this space on their lands.
A proposed pipeline brings together a wave of resistance, fierce collective work. The beluga calf listens to the call of its mother and sends back an important contact call to its mother through echo location that shrinks to isolation and is swallowed up by the loud reverberations of a boat engine covering kilometers of space. The calf is is out of contact with its mother and at risk
On a larger scale, with a mega motor of GNL sends out a pipeline project for the Saguenay that appears to drown the voices of sense. What impact will x tons of x have on the environment? what is the impact of super tankers going down a narrow fjord if a small motor boat can already obliterate a mother calf call ? The use of x amount of the provinces hydro power? and the leaking pipelines from the west of canada to the east. This agressive tidal wave of a project will be broken my thousands of people working at bringing it down and this work will not cease as this wave of greed and environmental destruction can quickly retake its power. For now the conclusions of the BAPE is that this project equates to a glass half empty rather than half full.
Listening has take place.
In a balmy August night lying on a hammock I see the night sky through a frame of birch branches.
Part of the day has been dedicated to the actions against plans by GNL to extends a pipeline already extended across 3 provinces into this one here, to spill out into ships in the Tadoussac marine park- an insidious project with 27 lobbyist working to make it happen. The ships would almost outsize the narrow fjord and would blast through the sonar communication of the last remaining endangered belugas. Looking through the canopy of birch leaves into the night sky suddenly a shooting star flies past, over the ravaging extraction, leaky pipelines, inviting an inspiring change of scale.
As we leave, I worry about loosing the connection to rocks, water, and plants, creatures in this extraordinary landscape where we have been since the start of confinement.
I am tethered in by both floating and taught threads to the locations where I drew, the places spent in observation, listening, seeing, and finding active awareness of relationships between, for example, a birch and their surrounding moss beds, or twisting cedars growing out of rock bases, touching the fjord, where beluga pods gently open the surface of the water; white mounds rising, flashing like the birch trees in moonlight.
I am not loosing 'here', but anchored to these places, the complex and precise relationships found there, held and woven into the time of there, accessible anywhere, anytime. A line that extends from the body right back down to that rock where the listening and drawing happened and where with my spine curved into that cedar.
Departures and arrivals.
*( works in the early 90's: threads taught accross rooms, threads decending from the ceiling changing the perception of space, 2 tiny sculpted heads joined by a taught thread accross the room where to draw the line.
Boundaries
Boundaries are never lines they are a multitude of forms meeting one another. In drawing these trees I am struck by how every section of the tree is in relation to a multitude of ever more relationships: ecosystems, insects, mosses, lichen etc. The trees form emerges through the observation of its surrounding spaces.
footprints in the snow
Tracks in the snow show how busy it is here, hares, birds, linxs, squirrels, deer, dogs, and no human tracks until my feet arrive. I take note: how to make new tracks together, quietly, not one set of tracks is greater or lesser. The impact we have made obliterating the journeys of so many living beings is heavy, how can our footprints become lighter?
The Saguenay Fjord merges into the gulf of the St Lawrence, there are ferries, a marina, and unbelievably sized super tankers hitting the soft line of horizon like bulldozers, obliterating any sense of scale with the landscape. Every oil trailing gas burning ship weighed down by the containers of stuff we order with a click of our finger. But now, during this month of peak confinement, the horizon line holds the space between sky, land, and water, vibrating gently at this meeting point, no obstructions.
The whales and belugas dependent on echo-location and often in distress with marine traffic are in this parenthesis of time with a greatly reduced noise and chemical pollution. It is short this parenthesis of time but it holds a possible shape for the future.
Arriving in Tadoussac spring 2020, as the schools were closing in Montreal. A chance to leave the city, be with trees, rock, and the fjord. Self-isolating amongst the boreal birch tree, itself a symbol of renewal, the super moon, and the belugas, here since the ice age. The shipping traffic almost stopped, there is hardly a ferry crossing the fjord, the horizon is clear and despite the anxiety of the pandemic a new current was palpable- time to listen - time to act. This is a place, visited since early childhood, is where the waters feel as though they inhabit me.
GREMM project progresses
Having spent three inspiring days with some of the of 'GREMMlins' in Québec city there is a lot to consider.
There are projects in development that will allow the live listening and seeing of whales along the south and north shore of the Saint Lawrence with out getting into a boat. Research projects on the changing health toxicologie of the river and new technologies to identify more precisely how each whale interacts socially in their sonic world .
Further to visual identification, each whale's acoustic tag will slowly be identified. I was shown a picture of a beached right whale on the north shore taken by the toxicologist. The impact of this image is confrontational, woeful and important for recognizing the direct impact the polluted and noisy river environment has on their populations. A whole new archive of vertical identification using drones is also in the process of being completed.
The updates and articles are posted on the informative Baleine en direct web site.
At this point, one plan would be to document, through drawing, descriptions of their identities as seen by the human eye, or the drone on location. The identification archive is an important part of the GREMM studies how else could see these identifications?
Start of GREMM project
The GREMM, founded in 1985 and based in Tadoussac, is a non-profit organization dedicated to scientific research education and conservation of the whale and beluga populations of the Saint Lawrence River. I have been going to Tadoussac most summers since I was a child, when the town was quiet and the era of whale watching tourism had not begun. Now a world heritage site, the town hosts thousands of international tourists who are mostly in and out in 24 hours having booked themselves on a whale watching trip, bought a souvenir, and hopefully visited GREMM's museum and education site. As tourism gets faster, the expectation is to quickly "capture" the whale in its habitat—with the added urgency to see the belugas, as they are now classified as endangered. The acceleration of boat traffic, the ongoing chemical waste coming into the river, the pleasure boat and shipping traffic and the future threat of the GNL pipeline lead to a severe breakdown of this local habitats dating back 10 000 years.
Having met a behavioural ecologist specializing in mother-calf beluga communication in 2017, we are collaborating to find forms through drawing and acoustic work to bring this research to light. The project starts with the charcoal portraits of GREMM members to see how each researcher works in this dedicated team. This begins to give me the material to create drawing work that will take forms that can readily be shared with the transient and rooted populations of Tadoussac and branching out to more specific contexts.
Today I drew a toxicologist who grew up in Martinique, whose soil has been continually treated with high doses of a pesticide called kepone that continues to have impacts on the public's health and remains in the soil for generations. He is now part of the GREMM team working on Marine Mammal Emergencies treating stranded whales, analyzing the toxicity levels in through biopsies in dead whales. A second drawing based on our exchange time shows a beached dead right whale he witnessed overlayed by the structural formula of kepone .
The series is ongoing and will appear slowly in these posts.