Interalia Magazine
An online magazine dedicated to the interactions between the arts, sciences and consciousness.
Sarah Slavick: Elegy to the Underground
Excerpt-
In the book, the Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben makes the case that the forest is a social network where trees engage in social behaviors, communicating with one another through a vast network of roots. They are not simply individual entities but part of a much larger, complex system that communicates and responds as an organism. There is a whole ecosystem that lives and thrives at the top, around, and in a tree. Through its whole life and even after it is dead and decaying, a tree supports the life around it. Through sharing resources and working together in complex and infinite pathways, alliances, and kinship networks, trees reach enormousness and increase their chances of survival and ours as well. These new discoveries of the hidden life of trees suggest new metaphors for our survival and how we should act to protect our home and our species. My Elegy to the Underground watercolors and oil paintings are a tribute or memorial to trees whose heartbreaking loss I fear and mourn.
Elegy to the Underground 14, 2020 watercolor/arches paper
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Sarah Slavick is a visual artist, political activist, union leader, and professor in the Fine Arts Department at Lesley University’s College of Art and Design in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Slavick’s work was described in the Boston Globe as “a kind of abstract portrait of the psyche in all its dense, unknowable layers.” While her work is abstract, she references cell biology, accretion of geological formations, botanical structure, and the taxonomy of the natural world. Much of her work is inspired from literature, women’s studies, the sciences, philosophy, and the political arena. Slavick holds an MFA from Pratt Institute and a BA from Wesleyan University.
A member of a large family, she has five siblings, three of whom are also professional artists. The current exhibition, Family Tree Whakapapa, brings together the work of four sisters to ‘talk about trees.’ As curators, painters, photographers and writers, we portray trees in conditions in and outside of human care and conflict. In December 2020, the exhibit opened at the Aratoi Museum of Art and History in Masterton, New Zealand, followed at the Wallace Arts Trust Pah Homestead in Auckland and will be exhibited at the Erie Art Museum, Erie, PA USA in January 2023.