In the Grain of Time
Abstract Tree Photography
This body of work explores the symbolic aesthetic of tree rings, using photography and digital manipulation as a means to meditate on the layered processes of time and transformation. The images go beyond representations of trees, and instead construct visual essays – composites created from photographs of tree cross-sections, digitally altered and assembled into abstract forms that try to capture both the natural and the imagined.
At the heart of this series is the metaphor of the tree ring as a living archive. Each ring an imprint of a season passed, testifying to an act of survival. Tree rings embed absence and abundance, trauma and recovery, all compacted into quiet, concentric records. This internal chronology of the tree reflects the human experience. The works are therefore meditations on the indelible marks of time on the human psyche and how growth often emerges not in spite of rupture, but because of it.
My process involves fragmenting and reassembling photographs using Photoshop to create multi-layered images, often embedding short poetic fragments into the composition. These poetic texts are excerpts from published poems, chosen not as captions, but for their resonance with the image and to create a visual and emotional dialogue with the viewer. They whisper rather than declare. They reference the interior conversations we have with our own pasts: the things we tell ourselves in the quiet, the lessons inscribed in us that we are still learning to read.
The visual language of the series shifts across the works. Some pieces are dense and structural, echoing geological strata laid down over time. Others are airy and translucent, suggesting the passage of light through memory. Blues and ochres dominate the palette, evoking both the organic and the elemental—earth, water, weathering. My compositions tend to the abstract, but allude variously to elemental forces, mandalas, and wounds.
While trees serve as the literal source material, they are not the final subject. This work is about continuity through change, about the traces left behind by what was once vital. It is about the way time wounds and heals. It is about rebuilding—not once, but again and again. In this sense, the tree rings are not only records of life, but metaphors for identity: layered, cyclical, incomplete, and enduring.
Ultimately, “In the Grain of Time" honours the quiet wisdom of trees and proposes that we, too, carry our own concentric stories—each a threshold, a scar, a resurrection.
