Tree Martyr

 "A martyr (Greek μ?ρτυς "witness") is a person who is put to death or endures suffering because of a belief, principle or cause. The death of a martyr or the value attributed to it is called martyrdom.


'Tree martyr' is an art project I created. Its issue is the apparently unstoppable destruction of our environment.

The earth is a planet of forests.

They existed before us, they exist with us and they will exist after we are long gone.

Trees do not need us.

But we needed Trees ever since we started to exist.

We build houses and furniture out of their wood, we fire our ovens with it. We eat their fruits, even if we buy them in superstores. Even if nearly all of us live in big cities!

 
Now, in this very moment, we are destroying the few virgin forests that have survived, although we didn't plant them. Just to make profit. All we leave behind for our children and grandchildren is a deserted world, don't we?

Why do we care so little for those trees, for life itself?

Why do we wrap trees in barbed wire and then forget to unwrap them again?

I found all the trees that you can see on my photos on a border.

A border that we created at random.

A feedlot, a building site, a private property, a country.

 
Such borders exist wherever humans live, visible and invisible borders.

We go to war for these borders, fight for them, until death.

We send ourselves, our fathers and our sons into war, just to keep them existing.

But what is left after one or two generations of fight?

New borders are drawn and the old ones get forgotten.

The only thing that is not changing is the barbed wire, wrapped into trees.

But the tree has only two possibilities. Keep growing or die.

Both can happen, as you can see on my photos.

 
That's how trees become memorials of our exposure to nature, to ourselves.

       That's how trees become tree martyrs.

I come across those trees on my journeys all over the world, I photograph them and from time to time I find one which accompanies me back to my studio.

I try to show their wounds.

Through this process of designing it becomes more obvious what happened.

                                                             The title is "loop" 

A further object is the "lead coat Madonna" apology, but my English is not well enough for a correct translation.

This tree, plum, stood at a road and by the exhaust gases died. I wound a lead foil around the dead trunk.

These objects are like mirrors. They show our double moral. We love nature and we destroy them also. The Objekt"Janus" shows that exemplary. I made it of a split lime tree.

 
I would like to show you another object. Its title is "Hl.Sebastian" the Hl.Sebastian was killed by arrows. The tree died by steel-pipes. In order to clarify, I gave glass rods to the old wounds

 


‚Am Kreuz' is the strongest expression of a tree martyr in this project at the very moment. I found this dead tree in a border forest.

Obviously the tree was wrapped in barbed wire several times when he was young.

He tried to overgrow his wounds.

He didn't succeed.

Now he is a cross, a symbol of nature's pain through our borders and our carelessness.

                             A small Exhibition in Miesenbach

 
                                     New pictures.       

 
I want to invite YOU to send me pictures of tree martyrs that you've come across.

I would like to publish those as examples on this page.

Tell me where you found that tree and, if possible, his story.

Thank you.

Meine Galerie 

Exformation