The Sacred Grove Series
I've stood on the same ground my family has held for six generations. You learn, living that long in one place, that the land keeps talking whether or not anyone is listening. Sacred Grove is my attempt to listen — one tree at a time.
Each painting holds a single tree. And inside each tree, a letter.
The letters come from Ogham, the oldest written form of Irish — a script of straight strokes crossing a single line, cut into standing stones more than a thousand years ago. Its alphabet is named for trees. Beith, the birch. Duir, the oak. Sail, the willow. Twenty letters, twenty trees, a whole forest folded into a language. My people carried that language across an ocean and mostly let it go. I'm gathering it back the only way I know how — with paint, and slowly.
The Ogham is here, but I don't announce it. It lives in the mark-making, in the turn of a branch, in the way a trunk divides. You don't have to read it to feel it. That's the point. Some things are meant to be sensed before they're understood.
As for the trees themselves — I keep coming back to them because they stay. They root in one place and record everything that happens to it: the drought years, the good ones, the fire, the wind that only ever came from the west. They hold the seen and the unseen at once, canopy in the light, roots in the dark. When I ask what the land is saying beneath what we see, the trees are usually the ones answering.
The willow was where this series found its water. I'll follow it through all twenty.