Sacred Grove

Sacred Grove

What is the land saying beneath what we see?

Sacred Grove is a series of tree portraits in which I carry two inheritances at once — the Montana ground I was raised on, six generations deep, and the old tree-alphabet of my ancestors' homeland, worked quietly into each painting.

The alphabet is Ogham, Ireland's oldest script, in which every letter is a tree: Beith the birch, Sail the willow, Duir the oak. I embed it the way it was meant to be read — along the edges, in the marks, never announced. Each tree is a letter. Nothing is written on the surface. The grove spells something anyway.

The trees themselves are anything but quiet — vivid, alive with color, each one alert with its own weather. Somewhere in most of them, a bird waits to be found rather than shown. Six trees stand in the grove now, toward a full alphabet of twenty.

You are not meant to notice the letter at first. You are meant to lean in.