Letters of Love
Letters of Love explores the connection between time, memory, and human impact through photographs of beech trees engraved with names, monograms, dates, and messages. These carvings, made over many years, are visual records of presence and desire, love and impulse. Each mark exists within the slow timeline of the tree's life, changing as the bark grows, swells, scars, or decays.
Most of the photographs are close studies of these altered surfaces. However, three images step back to show the trees in their environment the way I first encountered them. From a distance, I often experienced a conflicted reaction: an urge to look away from the disfigured surface, paired with a pull to decode the messages left on it. At the heart of this work is the tension between intimacy and distance, concealment and revelation.
The carvings exist in both public and private spaces. Trees close to trails are often densely marked on the side facing the path, while the reverse side may remain untouched. Occasionally, I find a tree deep in the woods that appears pristine until I circle around and discover a message or names bound in a heart.
This work also draws from personal memory. As a child, I secretly looked through my father’s medical journals, captivated and repulsed by clinical photographs of skin diseases. The resemblance between those images and the scars, lesions, growths of these trees is something I only recognized later. But instead of illness, the trauma I document now are messages of love: names carved as if to defy time, though ultimately made unrecognizable by it.
This project, Letters of Love: Engraved Beech Trees consists of 20 images printed on vintage (expired) 11” x 14” photographic paper manufactured in the 1970’s and 1980’s. The work is photographed with an analog film camera. The final photographic image area is 10” x 10” and measures 16” x 16” framed.
The series consists of 17 close-up views of the bark of beech trees which have letters, names and numbers cut into them. The difference in the look of the markings from each other depend upon how long ago the marks were made and if the tree is diseased.
There are also three landscapes depicting some of the engraved trees photographed at distances in which I first discovered them.