The Tree Husband, 2015

I was thinking about trees and the idea of home. Wondering if my husband was a tree, which species he’d be. Immediately an oak tree came to mind – something about their beautiful leaf shape and wood grain, the magical acorns & their luxurious groundedness. Later I read about the Irish Tree Alphabet where the oak stands for strength, stability and nobility.

Can a dream dream? Is there a Beauty sleeping
in a tiny chamber of leaves and small twigs?
Norman MacCaig

‘That mesh of leaves and twigs of fork and froth, minute and endless, with the sky glimpsed only in sudden specks and splinters, perhaps it was only there so that my brother could pass through it with his tomtit’s tread, was embroidered on nothing, like this thread of ink which I have let run on for page after page, swarming with cancellations, corrections, doodles, blots and gaps, bursting at times into big clear berries, coagulating at others into piles of tiny starry seeds, then twisting away, forking off, surrounding buds of phrases with frameworks of leaves and clouds, then interweaving again, and so running on and on and on until it splutters and bursts into a last senseless clutter of words, ideas, dreams, and so ends’.
‘Baron in the Trees’, Italo Calvino

Pigment inks on Hahnemuhle acid free Photo rag bright. Edition of 10.

Deborah Smith
Photography
387 x 580