Keira McArthur

The Tree Time show in SH242 was populated with rich and varied conversation, discovery and all that is wonderous about people, colour and being alive in the world. I’m still feeling reverberations and will be for months to come. Through May there was big bustle going on outside in the Cotton Factory halls and gallery spaces – The CF 10th Anniversary party on the 4th-5th, fundraisers and concerts through the weeks, receptions, classes, life drawing gatherings, artists shifting their studio spaces. I kept my door open and the gallery lights on through it all – the trees welcomed close to a hundred and twenty people of all ages into a space of wonder, colour and gesture. One visitor said, “Oh! It’s like a sacred grove in here!”

What a joy, for me, to introduce the colours of eleven trees, two insects, three plants, black rice and copper to the people who came. Conversation flowed from there into so many intriguing places, from colonialism in Central and South America (driven largely by tree colour after Logwood was discovered by the Spanish) through the personal, direct experience of making the materials you use in your work from scratch, to the way that colour is alive, and changes over time when it interacts with light. The way we all interact with light and change, over time.

There were other conversations around the incredibly contorted, expressive crimean lindens I used as my central imagery. These lindens grow along the shore of English Bay in Vancouver; I first saw them through the restaurant windows of the Sylvia Hotel. Mom had just died at the end of January after a long journey of discovery and release as a result of choosing ‘death tourism’ in Swizerland. She was not sick, just tired, and ready to go. In defiance of Canada’s laws for medically assisted death, she flew alone to Basel and did not come back. I’d known her plan for years and had walked with her through all of the discovery and emotional challenge. By the time I arrived at the Sylvia in March 2022 I was utterly spent in exhaustion and the complexities of grief. I drew the trees through the restaurant windows.

Many of the hundred and twenty that toured the show felt a resonance with that story. Some with my mom’s choice, some with the entanglements of family obligation and emotional denial and reaction through the entire spectrum from joy to anguish. We make choices, don’t we, and then navigate through the consequences. Everyone has this story, about helping someone through a difficult thing, about the experience and effects of loss. Grief can be a treasure hunt – there were many rich and personal conversations around this.

Because the trees I drew were crimean lindens, and because Russia had invaded Ukraine two weeks before I arrived in Vancouver, I named the largest piece ‘Ukraine’. The trees in this piece each wear a different transparent pigment through which you see the bodies of other trees. Where they overlap there are faces, open mouths, and more bodies, all in gestural motion. It is a prayer, this painting, that we learn to stop warring on each other in this world. That we find new ways to stop genocide before it begins. That we lay down our weapons, and leave them behind. Gaza, Rafah, Sudan, The Congo, all Indigenous peoples, poverty, economics, Corporate greed, divestment and more all became part of the larger conversation around this painting.

Making ink is not difficult. It requires just a few tools, some aluminum sulphate (alum – any dyers supply store will have this), gum arabic (mine is sourced from Umbrella Acacias in Sudan), a pot and a way to heat it, extract or source materials (apple bark, buckthorn berries, black rice, for example), some tums and some tartaric acid to ‘push’ the colour, and curiosity.

The course I took began in the same month that Mom flew to Swizerland and continued for eight weeks, and I do recommend this course as an excellent foundation (offered through MAIWA in Vancouver). So many who toured the show were enthralled by the history of colour and how humans have always found ways to make it from sources as diverse as minerals (blues), cuttlefish and mummy wrappings (sepia & brown), snails, plants and trees (purples), bugs (reds) and a whole plethora of things that make gorgeous yellows. Every kid who came through got a turn with brushes and ink on a big piece of paper, and left with their own art work.

I’ve read a lot about trees since March 2022. In The Songs of Trees (2017) David George Haskell taught me that trees are systems of symbiotic relationships with all that lives within, on and around them. In Finding The Mother Tree, Suzanne Simard showed me how forests are relational systems, with the strongest and oldest supporting the life of the youngest. Trees are relational beings that are never solitary, always connected. The same is true of Humans.

The show now moves on to an online life, through essays, video, stories and images. Tree Time conversations in May are the beating heart of this next stage, and I want to thank all who came and engaged so beautifully with the colour, the stories, and the conversations that grew in what did feel like a little sacred grove, where time slowed a little and gave us all some space to wonder in. Thanks also to the crimean lindens at English Bay, to The Sylvia Hotel, to the trees, plants and bugs that gave their colour, to water that played with the colour so beautifully on the canvases, and to my friends and family for their support through all the making and building of this show.