The Generations Tree Scroll

Generations Tree

3' fabric wall scroll

Novation

May 2012

Wren Wilson

This is a collaborative piece I did with the lovely artist and fire dancer extraordinaire Kara Chambers.

 I had been wanting to do an image with a large tree concerning generations in families which would fit with my thesis on the butterfly effect. I was (and still am) fascinated by the mythology and the symbolism of the tree of life and collected many images of and inspired by it.

Some examples of tree images I collected.

I had been thinking on themes about how remarkable it is that we are alive specifically because each generation of our ancestors got together. I knew I wanted to do a bold image of a tree because of the cultural image of a family tree. I had been in a black and white photography class with Kara under the tutelage of Mary Bailey Thomas and Kara had produced some stunning botanical photography. 

Examples of Kara's work from our class. 

Especially spectacular were her pinhole photographs, which were produced by taking a piece of photosensitive gelatin silver print paper and putting it in of a sealed box with a small hole on one side. 

This is one of Kara's pinhole photographs, (but not the one used for the collaborative piece.)

Since the class, I had been enamored with her tree photos, and I asked her for permission to modify and reproduce one in a large format. I showed her what I could do by overlaying text on the image with some digital wizardry which would make only the parts of the photo where the text was present visible. We talked together about what the text should contain. We went through several drafts of text and ended up with a version of the following paragraph:

"An extraordinary sequence of events had to happen for you to ever be born. Had your great-great-grandmother and your great-great-grandfather not come together at the exact time that they did, you could not exist. It had to happen at that precise moment for the particular sperm to fuse with the particular egg that would make up the combination of genetic building blocks that would eventually fuse to make you.  If she had met someone else, if he had stopped to tie his shoe, if a falling tree had squashed them, or if anything changed in their lives, the one sperm and egg out of unfathomable numbers would not have united. You would not exist as you do. Now multiply that improbability through every generation of your ancestors. You originate from survivors, people who came together at the right moment for you to come into being."

I then modified the photo with repetitions of the paragraph and had it printed by the wonderful local print agency, Ad Color, on canvas and decided to hang it with a unique scroll style using metal rods. Upon critique by my professor Kim Varnadoe, we decided to reprint it on a semi-transparent fabric and make the text slightly larger and hopefully more legible. It came out even better than we could have hoped and was a hit when it was featured in Novation in May of 2012.  

Detail of the revised print.

Note that I still have the piece and it's available for sale or display in shows if you're interested!