Soliphillia I

By Carol Healy – View Artist’s Profile

The word ‘Soliphillia’ is a new term which looks at our connection to place, and the love and responsibility for a location, bioregion, or planet that is deeply interconnected in unity and brings people together, this term was coined by Glenn Albrecht, Sustainability Professor, and author.

The drawings of the broken bark appear as ‘islands’ isolated and floating in space, but within each ‘island’ a rich landscape of textures made by lines and marks encompassing time; we see the complexities of the slow growth of the tree’s ‘skin’. This is a fragment of something much larger, that was once connected to a whole network of other trees and to a whole ecosystem that we are all a part of.

The bark comes from a tree stump that was left by the roadside in 2017, felled after storm Ophelia damaged so many trees, on Center Park road, trees (possibly lime) originally planted by the Ford plant over 70 years ago. These drawings are a way of honouring their life and preserving their memory.