Everyone has a tree memory, and if not of one tree, then perhaps of many: an impression based on a collation rather than a singular moment. The tree, of all things on earth is perhaps the most subliminal of sentient life forms. They become most present in their absence. We notice them when they fall or burn. Harshly pruned or hacked to the stump, felled trees are the last legal public executions. And the deforestation of earth, from vast tracts of forest to the house next door, feels both leaden in its inevitability and violent in its velocity. Instead of planting, we build. It’s hard to imagine the primeval equation of trees outnumbering humans. There is no word for trees as a collective that sounds like humanity, so, even verbally, they are stateless. Socially, the tree is a marker of status, yet also a perpetual nonentity: an obstacle to a view, or a barrier to widen a road. In The Domain, where the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) stands, the fig trees form a bower, arching their grey limbs like cathedral stone to the Gallery steps. In the process of major expansion, some trees went to make way for the site, and this served as a physical basis of a major new artwork by Simryn Gill.
, 2020–2022, sprouts from a 110-year-old Canary Island date palm tree (that was found to have weevils) uprooted in 2020 to make way for the Art Gallery’s new building. “This tree,” shrugs Gill, “was
