Marlene Creates Larch, Spruce, Fir, Birch, Hand, Blast Hole Pond Road, Newfoundland 2007-2026

Reach outwards with one hand, your palm held vertically in space. Feel your tendons stretch, and how the strain is alleviated if you lift your arm slightly, to about eye level. It's a curious gesture - your hand raised as if to wave, but more receptive than communicative. Almost an antenna. It's how you might touch something larger than yourself: a horse perhaps, or an elephant, receiving warmth through the softness of vour palm. Or, how you might say 'hello' or 'goodbye' to someone through a window.

Here are 154 photographs arranged in pairs. Each pair of photos shows the artist's left hand raised to touch a tree, first in the years 2007-2015 (in black and white), and then the same tree revisited eleven ears later from 2018-2026 (in colour).
Occasionally, in the later series, a tree is absent because it has been blown down, and the artist's hand lingers in the space where it once was.
Larch, Spruce, Fir, Birch, Hand, Blast Hole Pond Road, Newfoundland 2007-2026.
Can we pause for a moment - one hand raised in the air, as if we are a conductor commanding silence - and listen again to the joyful rhythm of those words? Count the syllables on your fingers: Larch, Spruce, Fir, Birch, Hand (One, two, three, four, five), Blast Hole Pond Road (one two three four), Newfoundland (onetwothree), 2007-2026.
What do we perceive? Paradoxically, looking closely at these photographs reveals that the work is not particularly about "looking." The artist's extended hand puts us in first-person view, and we can't help but imagine ourselves in this forest, which feels so full of touch, smell, and (especially) sound. My overwhelming impression, as I spend time with the photographs, is one of sound soft-padding footsteps following a path, or the gentle scrunch of stepping off. trail; a susurrous breeze rustling treetops; an unseen squirrel admonishing from somewhere overhead; a branch brushing through my hair. The river's ablutionary
burble.
The repetitive nature of the imagery encourages a perceptive viewer to pick out small differences in each pair of photographs, and for me these differences also evoke senses beyond the visual. One tree revisited after eleven years is veiled behind new growth, and I imagine soft bristles tickling my arm. Another seems to lean more vertiginously over the river than before. Occasionally a tree has fallen in the intervening years, and with its absence I imagine how the canopy has opened, how the local soundscape has changed.
Larch, Spruce, Fir, Birch, Hand treads a desire path back and forth through time.
A book is a good home for this work, because the work itself is personal and intimate, and because the images work well encountered one by one (or two by two), footsteps on a path to understanding. How small details in the photos shift over eleven years: thick tree bark splits wide, a dead branch snaps off entirely.