Excerpt:
After we found kinship among the trees through the embodiment exercise, we sat in collective artmaking, using black cherry ink prepared from the bark of those very trees, to draw. Our open-ended drawing prompt was simply a small cherry bark imprint from the same trees we sat among, using their own ink, and the ink-stamped words “kin” and “black cherry” on paper.

Like staring at clouds or a Rorschach image, we were each given one of an infinity of unique imprints with an infinity of possible interpretations, but the mind typically quickly sees something. I saw the torso of a human, myself, walking toward me with the backdrop of a steep rocky cliff behind me and to my right. I envisioned an exact location, an I95 off-ramp shoulder in Newton, MA. A beautiful, loud but lonely, desecrated place.

The bark imprint grounded me in a distant but familiar place and gave me a toehold from which I began to draw. The rocky cliff presented the sharp angles and crystalline fractal faces and cuts of rock, with more curvaceous vines and trees crawling over or jutting out from nooks and crannies in and above the cliff face.  The word “interconnection” came to me and I began to draw a combination of unbounded fractal networks and bounded fractals. Asymmetry came naturally in my drawing, from the sharply angular tree structure of young pines, to the highly sinuous and meandering network of vines or rivers.  I connected the angular network with the sinuous one through a dotted connector which ran through the bark imprint “cliff”. This was an impulse to both connect tree, rock, and river and recognize their distinct existence.