Description
Tree watching refers to the meditative practice of observing trees. Across cultures, trees have long been understood as custodians of history and portals to the spiritual realm. Here, we also acknowledge trees as watchers of our personal and collective lives—another kind of archival medium, legible only to those who revere them.
Tree Watching presents the work of Aziza Gibson-Hunter, Vetiver (Vonne Napper), Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, and Niama Safia Sandy, artists united by their engagement with and reverence for the natural world. Their practices consider both natural and psychological landscapes, allowing the physical and metaphysical to meet through land stewardship, medicinal knowledge, foodways, socio-political histories, and the cultures held by the land’s inhabitants.
While trees may look different from one place to another, they grow according to a shared logic: at different paces, to different heights, bearing different fruit, yet remaining rooted as they reach upward toward the sky. Similarly, these artists draw on their cultural and aesthetic lineages to ground practices that bloom toward personal enlightenment, higher consciousness, and self-actualization.
Tree Watching blurs the lines of witness—between observer and observed, memory and presence, rootedness and transcendence. In this suspension, submission to the spiritual becomes possible. We are reminded of Indigenous ways of being and thinking with ourselves, with one another, and alongside the earth.