2025

site-specific installation for Building Five at NW Marine Artworks.

 Echo of the Oak was a site-specific response to the history of the exhibition space: a former WWII-era ship building hangar along the industrialized riverside. The piece eulogizes the memory of lost landscapes a half-millennium old that thrived before the colonialist drive and yearning for bigger/better/greater/more leveled savannah woodlands of slow-growth hardwoods in pursuit of agriculture, industry, expansion, and colonial era ships of war.

Made from Amazon cardboard paper pulp, these casts of one 400-year-old tree hardly capture the majesty of what was lost. The labor of grinding, mashing, and pressing the pulp, brought me closer to the material, contemplating its origins in now-felled forests, its journey, and its consequence.

Photos by Mario Gallucci