Joan Wulf views trees as record keepers, storing memory and time into their thick bark, their layered rings. They map out years of feast and famine, reflecting the state of the environment around them. They pass information through the mycelial mats of the forest floor, communicating and sharing resources with the trees around them. Out of these relationships and physical points of connection grows a community—the forest.
Wulf focuses on relationships between trees—and by extension between trees and people—in her series Echoes. The body of work charts a sort of dance between tree and human, where the artist aims not to depict, but rather to record.
The pieces are deeply corporeal, both in subject matter and method. After choosing her subjects carefully from her surroundings—be that in the city of Los Angeles or woods of Northern California—Wulf wraps each tree tightly in canvas, and, armed with wood she has charred, rubs the bark to map the imprint. The result is a smokey figure—a recording not merely of the tree, but a moment to moment mapping of Wulf’s physical engagement with the trunk.
These images—these echoes—describe the body language of the tree, the fingerprint of the artist, the space and time between them. Pressure, repetition, angle, direction. Movement. Each piece catalogues the choreography between artist and subject, where more often than not the subject leads and the artist can only follow. In these canvases, subject and artist are as blurred as the charcoal charting their interaction. The viewer is left with the echo of this relationship, this communion and subsequent collaboration.
While the series is an ode to trees, it is also a warning to humans. The strong figures Wulf honors appear smokey, almost ghostly, reminding the viewer of the rapidly warming climate, of fires ranging through California, as well as many other parts of the globe. Indeed, some of the charcoal Wulf uses as mark-makers was collected from burnt trees in Northern California. Finally, Echoes takes on one more meaning: someday these pieces may be literal echoes, the only recording of a once great tree.
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