We Could Tell You A Thing or Two
Wood, iron
2018

We Could Tell You A Thing or Two is a series of ‘person-sized’ sculptures, offering a personified take on nature. The title refers to the act of passing down knowledge, and the scale of the works hints at elders watching on.

This work draws on the notion of acquiring knowledge from precedents that could inform our future if one looks hard enough to source that information (tree rings). Several trees were felled, cut into cross-sections to make the data of previous decades and centuries accessible, mixed up, and re-assembled to demonstrate the different influences that can be considered if one chooses to acknowledge them (indigenous and non-indigenous idiosyncratic pools of information), and the roles that they can play in offering perspective.

The installation was inspired by the plethora of information that one can garner from studying tree rings – all of those years of wisdom and experience locked within the bark that one can glean information from if only one takes the time to ‘look inside’ at a material that is largely considered to be so very disposable, perhaps the ultimate in disposable materials, yet could help inform better considered futures.