And some day there will be nothing left of everything that has twisted my life and grieved it and filled me so often with such anguish. Some day, with the last exhaustion, peace will come and the motherly earth will gather me back home. It won’t be the end of things, only a way of being born again, a bathing and a slumber where the old and the withered sink down, where the young and new begin to breath.
Hermann Hesse – Wandering – The Bridge
While walking alone in the forest of my childhood an idea emerged from my troubled mind. I stood looking at a dead western cedar with a hemlock sapling bursting from its crown. This phenomenon is called a nurse log and is commonly seen in the temperate rainforests of British Columbia. I had been saddened by an earlier meeting with my ailing father during this pandemic summer visit and I was now coming to grips with the idea of losing him. In the great dead cedar trunk I saw a noble life which included surface scars and the lightening-strike char old trees inevitably bear. Looking up, I reflected upon the idea that the new tree was held and fed by the one underneath; and from this perch, was striving up into the same light that had shaped the life lived before. After carefully capturing this image on a sheet of film – the process itself a kind of alchemy – I headed to the airport and back to London, where I began my photographic series. Continuum focusses on the transmutation of trees; through the nurse log phenomenon. From relics of lives lived to new beginnings, from stature to sustenance; energy is not lost in the process, it is merely transformed.
