Pine Ailim

Framed 11" x 14"

Ailm — Pine

Head-on, it's a grove of pines with the light moving between the trunks — the near ones warm, the far ones dissolving into green. Then you move past it, and the surface changes. The entire Ogham alphabet is stamped into a gloss medium across the painting, invisible straight on, catching only when the light rakes across it. The language doesn't sit under the image. It sits on top of it, waiting for the right angle.

Ailm is the pine in the Ogham, Ireland's oldest alphabet, where every letter is a tree. In the lore that grew around the script, the pine stood for clarity and long sight — the tree that sees far. Here the whole alphabet is present in the gloss, and Ailm's own letter with it.

Part of Sacred Grove — the land in front of me, and the old alphabet of my ancestors' homeland carried in together. A painting that shows you one thing, then shows you another when you move.

What is the land saying beneath what we see?