Jessica Row: If a tree falls in the urban forest...

An exhibition by Jessica Row, inspired by the trees in naarm/Melbourne, exploring concern for the changing climate through screen prints, text, and sculpture. Created with found bark collected within the City of Melbourne, bronze and ceramic casts of tree textures renders the impermanent permanent, serving as a record of the city’s changing treescape.

Other artworks highlight our relationship to the environment, via screen printed copies of emails written by strangers to trees in Melbourne via the ‘Urban Forest Visual’. These are displayed next to monoprints made with bark, as an imagined response from the intended recipients. Alongside these are large, embossed prints of bark onto paper, framed with copper and inscribed with oxide powder, to align trees with a preciousness more often associated with other elements torn from the ground.

The artworks leave a trace of disappearance, as the city’s forest is slowly replaced with trees that are predicted to better suit our future climate.