“Artists in the Archive: Community” – exhibition

The Artists in the Archives Exhibition continues from September 2nd, 2022 through to the summer of 2023, at the Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History in Middlebury, Vermont, USA. To mark the 50th anniversary of the Sheldon Stewart-Swift Research Center, the museum invited an international network of 24 collage artists (including 5 from Europe) to engage with historical materials from the museums archive. Thank you to the curator and editor-in-chief of KOLAJ magazine, Ric Kasini Kadour for inviting me to take part in this project. It was a new a challenge for me to be invited to a project in which I had to create a collage using archival photos from a specific collection. But I really liked this opportunity to immerse myself in these images and photographs of history of the state of Vermont, and the people who once lived there. I spent many hours going through these archives and selecting photos for my work.

The collage that I created for the exhibition is titled “Trees as Part of the Community.” It is a tribute to the people of Vermont, whose faces I saw as I
searched through hundreds of photographs in the Vermont Landscapes Archive, and the trees that were also present in these images as part of their communities. In the composition of my collage we see a large Elm tree. I chose it as it was one of the most popular trees in the US. Our lives go on among the trees. We sit under them, mark city streets with them, date under them, admire them, and watch them grow…. Like every tree, the stories of individual lives are woven into the Elm tree in this image. In this way, it becomes a family tree, a witness to generations of human life, as people are, after all, part of nature. Trees breathe through photosynthesis, which is their main activity, but they can also be fragile. Just like in our own lives,
sometimes disasters happen.

Since the mid-20th century, Dutch Elm disease has killed millions of these trees around the world. One culprit is a beetle called the elm beetle, which carries the fungus Ophistoma Ulmi, which destroys this particular species of tree. Yet humans are also primarily responsible for the spread of this disease. My Collage for this project reflects on how the lives of trees and people are deeply intertwined. Asking questions about how we cope with the passing of time? And how do we accept the fact that we are mortal after all? At the bottom of the tree, we see a beetle (elm beetle) threatening the elm tree. But at the very top are little girls holding an elm seed. The girls are hope. Will they plant a new tree?