Artist Statement:

Two images have stayed in my mind while making this work and now converge and I have intuited their correspondence.  One I see every day pinned to my studio door of a giant stump in a Canadian boreal forest area just timbered. The man beside it is dwarfed despite this being only remains of the tree. The image is a stab and a reminder.  The other is the Brera Madonna or Pala Montefeltro by Piero della Francesca with saints surrounding the Madonna who is seated on a dais, the infant Jesus in her lap and the patron, the Duke of Montefeltro, kneeling. Above this Madonna is hanging an egg. The painting has Piero’s signature of a contained or sealed-in silence. There are many debates about what the egg means exactly; it is not Piero’s iconography alone. One accepted explanation is that the egg represents the cosmos, the generator of life. And to me it represents the potential of what is to be, an expansive movement of life, energy embodied. 

I see many resonances between the Brera Madonna and the Mother Tree. We might recognize that the Mother Tree holds dominion over us versus the other way around. We don’t have to be pagans, animists, feminists, or Catholics to acknowledge the sometimes-miraculous role of the mother. The tree does not care for us directly and is passive; mute and without any messages about how we might behave.

I have made this installation in reverence for the mother tree of the forest; the mother tree partakes in a system of reciprocity: a nutrient exchange, among other phenomena, through root and fungal systems. Without the trees our network of life will be near collapse. The trees’ role in the carbon cycle and all things natural then, could well be considered sacred. 

Bio:

Rhonda Smith has been immersed in visual study all her adult life. She graduated from St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY, and studied at the School of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Cooperativa Mosaicisti, Ravenna Italy. She painted until about five years ago when she turned to sculpture. Her work incorporates her abiding love of science, the land and water, and the sacred. The idea in science of any dynamic system being in a state of disequilibrium is an underlying concept in her work.  Of particular concern now is that our planet has lost its wild spaces, we are in a state of displacement, and too many species fall into the lost category. On the other side is the aspiration for presence and the ineffable in any one artwork. The Tibetan Buddhist concept resonates that each phenomenon, physical or spiritual, has four levels: the outer, the inner, the secret and the ultimately secret.   

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