| Description |
-
Martina Tan (SMFA at
Tufts B.S./B.F.A. 2021) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and student from Mount
Laurel, NJ. Her current art focus arose from a lifelong fascination with nature and her
own skin, and engages with practices of mental wellness, environmentalism, and community
building.
Treehugger is a site-specific installation
on a dead but otherwise intact tree, intended ... read moreas a community-generated gesture of care
for one another and for the natural environment. Human intervention has reduced this
lone tree on the Tufts University campus to a utilitarian structure that is nearly
unidentifiable as a once-living organism. Treehugger enables a process of recovery and
reflection centered around this tree, via a crowd-sourced, human-sized
“skin” of handmade paper made from recycled
cardboard.
The pages sent to participants were
returned by mail, then attached to the tree in Medford, MA for a week-long outdoor
installation. This allowed each walker’s respective journey to converge at a
single site, in spite of the geographic spread of these reflective acts. The recording
of the live-streamed performance at the site underscores the variety of relationships
that the participants have with nature, with themselves, and with other
people.
Treehugger Installation (Materials: ink on
handmade paper from recycled cardboard, twine, clothespins, tree branches,
single-channel video, digital inkjet print on
paper)
Treehugger Performance (Duration: 59 min 17
sec)
Keywords: trees, papermaking, community art,
mail art, postal art, correspondence art, protection, breathing, multimedia, ecology,
queer ecology, journaling, field notes, recycling, sustainable art, performance,
site-specificread less
|
|---|
This object is in collection
