Some notes and reflections on the tree
“Memory of trees, trees of memory: the giants of our forests have not finished surprising us and being transcended into works of art.” Giuseppe Penone
My work focuses on landscape, nature and trees.
For me, the tree is a kind of allegory of the body, of being.
I share the idea found in Native American mythology: “Humans, animals, plants, we are all one being”¹ and that the tree “also serves to symbolize the cyclical nature of cosmic evolution, death and regeneration”².
This birth-life-death cycle repeats itself. An emotion is born, lives, dies; a being is born, lives, dies; the same goes for an idea, a sensation, a moment. It's an inescapable cycle.
“Leaves evoke a cycle of trees that shed and recover their leaves every year”. According to Mircea Eliade³ “It loses its leaves and recovers them and [...] regenerates, it dies and is reborn countless times (Elit.235)”.
It's called the Tree of Life, “the backbone supporting the human body”⁴, the Temple of the Soul, the Path of the Spirits, “the ascent path through which those who pass from the visible to the invisible would transit”⁵. Among the Pueblo Indians, the great fir tree of the world would allow souls to ascend, and its roots would be the “ladder by means of which the ancestors could climb to the Earth of our Sun”⁶, Jacob's ladder, shamanic pole, etc.
The tree weaves links between the visible and the invisible, which the thread follows and materializes.
“The tree also puts in communication the three levels of the Cosmos[...]The high branches communicate with the sky, attracted by the Light,[...] the trunk of the tree and the first branches communicate with the surface of the Earth”, and finally ‘the roots search the depths where they sink’ and explore the ‘underground’⁷ world.
But the tree is also the palaver tree, the sacred place under which we tell each other stories of where we've come from and where we're going, the one I discovered in my homeland
Dogon…
¹ Wa-Na-Nee-Chee et Eliane Harvey, L’oracle de l’aigle blanc – Vivre au quotidien la sagesse des indiens d’Amérique, Éditions Solar, 1997, 118 p.
² Jean CHEVALIER, Alain GUEERBRANT, Dictionnaire des symboles, Éditions Robert Laffont/Jupiter, Collection Bouquins, 62 p.
³ Ibid., 63 p.
⁴ Ibid., 62 p.
⁵ Ibid., 62 p.
⁶ Ibid., 62 p.
⁷ Ibid., 62 p.
