Skowhegan Birch: María Elena González

Birch bark lenticels are the horizontal, dark, hyphen-like lines or pores on the surface of birch trees that enable respiration and gas exchange for the tree’s inner tissues. In a literal sense, these corky cells—which look like pencil incisions on a semi-dirty page—allow the tree to breathe. Small organic and systematic cuts that let life get in and out. Or perhaps, they help the tree remain silent when not breathing. In the end, they are a scene of many mouths that release air—folded, almost closed. A simple act of survival.

The Skowhegan landscape is full of white birches, all around the studios, close to the gaze and the hand, and farther away as a multitude in the distance. They help the community of artists feel always accompanied, as silent companions. Are they really silent?

Tree Talk is a series by sculptor María Elena González that began at the School when she was  resident faculty in 2005. I knew this work from photographs, exhibitions, and numerous texts, but I always wondered how it all started. I imagined that, like so many works and thoughts at the School, it began by wandering randomly through the woods.

Apparently, this story unfolded in the stillness and observation of the numerous trees that often line the paths of the school grounds. Fallen birches seem even more human than when they are standing. Perhaps because they make us believe that if they could fall then everything can, at a certain point, collapse. Only when they have fallen do we realize that they no longer breathe. 

The birch bark is even more noticeable when exposed on the ground, like a carefully peeled skin. From there, María Elena wondered if that pattern—different and unique for each tree—somehow resembled the perforations of a piano scroll, circular and continuous.

In my romantic mind—always populated by the whispers that inhabit New England stories—I wonder if, for María Elena, this analogy could be a form of translation, giving the tree the opportunity to speak. To be clear, I do not think María Elena was interested in turning the tree into a metaphor for interspecies communication. Nor do I think the idea was to humanize a natural entity following an anthropocentric mood. Her question was much more scientific, objective, and at the same time inherently poetic: could these markings on the bark be read as a musical composition? If so, what would the bark of a tree sound like?

Visual thinking. One eye on nature. Open File. Another eye on a roll of sheet music. Read on. Another eye on the silence between two sounds. Note durations. The other on the intermittent repetition of the bark. Reset. An equitable situation. Loop on. Moving from one space to another, and back to the same one, but different. Off.

María Elena proceeded to record the bark’s patterns through a series of rubbings on paper and scans and, over the course of a decade, adapted these markings to create acoustic sculptures. Hers was an exercise in infinite patience, one that nature itself demands…

Here, however, I wanted to speak about the beginning of this idea—since beginnings are always happening at Skowhegan, and, in the end, it is always the place to which everything wishes to come back.

Ruth Estévez