2007–2015

My greatest aspirations are presently constituted by the six acres of old-growth boreal forest that I inhabit, and I’m slowly tuning my body and my reflexes to its details. I’m coming to know this habitat by engaging with it in various ways: corporally, emotionally, intellectually, instinctively, linguistically, and in astonishment.

This series of black-and-white photographs concerns the inter-relationship of three entities: first, individual native trees; second, their context in the collective of the boreal forest system; and third, the human perceiver, as manifested by the gesture of my hand touching the tree trunks.

I’m interested in the particularity of each tree – its “thisness” (haecceitas) – and the circumstances that bring me to discern certain trees amongst the thousands in this forest. Even when I’m being my most attentive, there are still many trees I have not yet noticed enough to remember as individuals.

This work harkens back to one I did in 1983 when I photographed my hand – which was 24 years younger – on 22 ancient standing stones on various islands of the Outer Hebrides in Scotland. Now, instead of travelling to distant sites to find subject matter, I’m paying attention over a long period of time to the place where I live and I’m familiarizing myself with the multitude of trees here.

I believe that aesthetics plays an important role in environmental considerations, and vice versa. Trying to integrate my life and my artwork with this habitat has resulted in the deliberate slightness of my artistic gesture. My aim is to achieve an aesthetic stance in collaboration with the landscape that surrounds me. In responding to this place, I’m becoming more and more sensitive to the vivid, ephemeral nature of being.

Each year I continue the series of photographs with about nine trees that have come to my attention. But what I should say is my attention has come to them – either because of their location or because of something that happened.

2018–2026

As soon as you touch something, it becomes part of your story.
—Max Dean, in the film Still Max by Katherine Knight, 2021

Between 2007–2015, I photographed my hand (using black-and-white film) on 81 trees that I had individuated in the patch of old-growth boreal forest where I have been living and working since 2002.

Then, without initially having planned to do so, in 2018 it occurred to me to continue the series – not by photographing my hand on more newly noticed trees, but by re-photographing my hand (using colour digital photographs) on the same trees after an eleven-year interval, i.e. the ones from 2007 in 2018; the ones from 2008 in 2019 . . . and continuing until 2026.

In the eleven years between photographs, changes can be seen in the trees themselves, the surrounding vegetation, and my aging hand. In several cases, the trees on which I originally photographed my hand have been blown down in hurricanes and other severe wind storms. In those instances, I photograph my hand in the empty spaces.

I find that living with this much nature around me, I have to get used to a lot of loss: irreversible death and decay. Time becomes visible in the flesh of each tree and the flesh of my aging hand.

If there was a soundtrack to these photographs, it would be the aria “Ombra mai fu” composed by Handel for the opera Xerxes (1738) in which the king addresses his favourite tree.