Floating Chronologies is an ongoing body of work in conversation with climate change where material uniqueness and metaphorical language take center stage in an abstract, radically empathetic approach to reimagining our relationship with trees.

 

Floating Chronologies investigates dendrochronology, the study of mapping tree-rings, and the socio-ecological costs of institutionally displayed samples of tree cross-sections as examples of patriarchy’s “Man’s Conquest of Nature” narrative. Scientists use the term “floating chronology” to describe a tree-ring history whose beginning and end dates are unknown. My project transforms this concept into metaphor for the limits of our human-centered experience and a call to action to reevaluate our relationships with the non-human world.

 

I am creating a unique series of non-narrative alternative monuments as large-scale mixed media artworks to replace the museum tree. For example, in my work, “Time Traveler.” Viewers will not find labels like “American Discovered” pinned into spectacles of felled tree specimens. Instead, nature has its own perspective, and what might be a tree form transforms entirely into something mysterious, complex, and powerful in its own right. It becomes an energy field of swirling abstraction, a whirlpool of the eternal unconscious, suggestive of cosmic time and the shifting tectonic plates that form continents. Time becomes its own ecosystem, and we are collaborators, not controllers. 

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