Miranda Bellamy and Amanda Fauteux’s collaborative practice identifies and extends the stories of plants through site-specific research and experimentation. By listening to plants and responding through interdisciplinary projects, they make space for the critical revision of human and particularly settler-colonial histories and to reflect on material accountability, reciprocity, and ways of seeing.
‘Collective’ has been a process of accumulation. Over several years and across the many seemingly disparate locations the artists have visited, they have met with and photographed hundreds of marked trees. In their images, the makers of the varied traces etched into or painted on each tree are absent. We are left to wonder who is responsible for these marks, and why?
The trees and their marks have told stories of loss, trauma, healing, renewal, cooperation, and guardianship. Through their work Bellamy and Fauteux consider how we might, in approaching our relationship with trees through a new lens, be able to see past ourselves in a way that recognizes the significance of our interconnection.
