Exploding Tree from a series of eight works (with Elm by Sylvia Plath)

by Joanne Light
(Nova Scotia Canada)

Artist's Statement:

ELM

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root;
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it.
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallup thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, the big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin white, like arsenic.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches??

Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill. - Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath's poem, Elm, appearing above and displayed with the artwork mirrors the sensibility expressed in Exploding Trees and Trinities exhibit.

I discovered this poem after I had finished the series, Exploding Trees and Trinities, in 2007. I was struck by the similar emotional sensibility that the poem expressed as compared with what I was feeling when I produced the "Exploding Trees". When you read the poem, you will feel the energy of shock and awe in the face of "life" that I as artmaker was experiencing when going through the artmaking process of creating these works (The individual's way of synthesizing the affecting stimuli outside her control). In short, the work is an emotional response to life events (in the global and personal arenas), expressed visually and through a free associative verse text statement:

Years later in Canada I cut out an exploding tree
and placed it between two mountainous mounds, one white, one black.
But the black one was streaked with white
And the white one was streaked with black.
Mauve clouds dotted the sky and tiny black trinities,
pieces of jagged half stars of David,
were slung every which way.

A tiny black crow sits high in it.
I cut out lots of triangles for this one
many memories in threes' trinities:
Him, me, her; Him, her, Tiko; his thigh, his back, his lips;
Her Lauren outfit, her sailor suit, her leathers;
Martinsburg, Shepardstown, Berkley Springs;
His Studebaker, my bicycle; her 240 Z;
The Mumms, the diamond, the roses;
one, two, three trinity beat
of the obsessive waltz.

From this I experienced physical, emotional and mental shock and to which I had to respond artistically for a sense of "doing the work" to survive the impact of these events on my being. Putting heart, soul and body into the work allowed me to express these real events, over which I had no control, and, in my own small way, master and attempt to synthesize their effect on me so that I experienced psychic relief and finally closure.

Hopefully, their spirit will empower all those who look on them and provide a sense of identification for anyone experiencing events with which they feel they cannot cope, be it loss of loved ones, loss of forests, global warming, or personal betrayal.

Anger and grief that situations engender can be transcended through artistic expression. "Exploding Trees" and "Trinities" are the result of this process and stand as the precipitate from the emotional suffering that the "life experiment" (process of going through life) catalyzes.

- Joanne Light 2008