TRODDEN
Artist-framed photographs and imprinted magnolia petals
Dutch Elm artist bench with takeaway prints
2020-2021
“I made this work at the start of the pandemic. I remember walking around with nitrile gloves on, not sure of what was safe to touch. I took solace in plant life, leaves and petals falling from trees, “pristine” amidst the chaos. With a magnolia tree near my house, I started to notice footprints in the fallen petals. This tree was next to a hospital, which housed an early Covid tent. I imagined the footprints were made by those on their way to the tent. I collected the petals, saved them, added to them, photographed them. A year later, when the vaccine had arrived, the tree bloomed again, and I affixed the dried up petals to museum board, and began to make this work. I placed some of the old, fallen petals, back onto the magnolia tree itself, like an offering. I printed out posters for viewers to take, to bend over and discover the petals just as I had, and to sit with this time and this loss. The posters sit on a piece of Dutch Elm that I got from the Woodland Cemetery-- the last of the living Dutch Elms in North America, which died from their own pandemic, a fungal disease spread by beetles. Fragility, the strange passage of time, anonymous loss, the vast space of grief, ecological interconnectedness (human and non-human), printmaking as a byproduct of life lived- are what I felt moved by in the making of this work.”
Kaitlin Pomerantz
““I had noticed a trodden-on magnolia petal, and admired the markings as well as the intense symbolism: a delicate piece of nature, carelessly marred by human exigency, transit, branding. I noticed, days later, the great bloom of a magnolia tree near my house, also precariously close to a hospital and COVID tent. Fully gloved and masked, I scarcely dared touch a thing outside of my home, yet, these freshly fallen petals promised a sort of safety if I could catch them upon first terrestrial contact. So the small collection began, for the duration of the bloom, and beginning of the quarantine. I would gently carry the petals home, and then crush them beneath my feet: a rumination on the toll of transit, the brevity of bloom, the proximity of mortality, the impossibility of harmless passage.””
