I’d been living in downtown Halifax less than a year when they closed the gates of the Public Gardens, a beloved retreat from the city’s noise and grit. The news dropped that someone had snuck in overnight and chiseled out a ring around the trunks of some thirty trees. Arborists call this act “girdling,” the brutal intent of which is to kill a tree where it stands. 

When not the work of a hungry animal, girdling is usually caused by carelessness–the misplaced swing of a chainsaw, or an abandoned support that becomes a garotte as a tree grows. It is unsettling to think of someone purposefully generating this kind of damage. The motive was unclear, and no guilty party came forward. For a rare moment, the community was in unanimous agreement: this was a tragedy. Security was heightened, experts were called in, and weeks of park closure followed. And there, documenting the trees in their vulnerable state, were Miranda Bellamy and Amanda Fauteux.

Splitting time between so-called New Brunswick and New Zealand, Bellamy and Fauteux are partners in love and art. They have produced images of trees from across North America and New Zealand, taking note of the marks left by humans who share their space. Many of the trees in Collective owe their existence to human intervention, driven by anthropocentric motives like colonial expansion, economic interest, and scientific study. They underscore humanity’s instinct to influence natural environments, often with the unintended and unjustified consequence of harming one element through attempts to nurture another. Illustrating the delicate balance between human ambition and environmental stewardship, while emphasizing the need for an awareness of the self in relation to the whole, this exhibition challenges us to find more sustainable and thoughtful approaches to coexistence. 

Collective was on view at the Mount Saint Vincent Art Gallery from June 21 to August 17th, 2024. All taken in 2023, the photographs document large living trees in key environments chosen by the artists. The exhibition’s title, Collective, is accessibly mutable. The trees make up a collective, a family experiencing variations of interaction with one another and their surroundings, but more broadly the subjects and visitors of this gallery—humans and the natural world—are part of a collective as entities sharing an environment.

Upon reopening of the Public Gardens after the incident, the repair efforts were visible and shocking. Wrapped burlap, like medical gauze, covered bridge-grafts, a process of patching that reconnects the roots of the tree with its branches to allow sap and nutrients to flow the entire length. Major interventions had been enacted with delicate care behind those closed gates. Visitors would instinctually place a hand on the affected trees as they passed by, like a condolence or a prayer.

This sense of veneration was renewed stepping under the familiar soaring double-height ceiling of the MSVU Art Gallery, where I found a kind of cathedral. Buttressing the room’s concrete canopy, four vertically stacked sections of trunk comprising Gird (Maple, Kjipuktuk / Halifax) pulls the gaze upward. Towards the bottom, a small section of massive trunk is swaddled in burlap, slightly sagged to reveal a laceration. Turning from this monolith to be confronted with more than 20 images of trees, some with wounds raw and weeping, a lump rose in the back of my throat.

I am primed to see humanity as a villain in these points of interaction, but this simplicity ignores the beauty of our species’ alliance with trees. Two years on, repair efforts on the Halifax Public Garden trees are yielding promising results. Just so, the story of this exhibition is not a scolding of humanity, but rather makes space to understand a relationship in flux. 

Bellamy and Fauteux’s photographs of trees have the distinct affect of portraits captured with tender care and attention. The artists have referenced a traditional hall of, organizing works that are uniform in scale and orientation on either side of the aisle to allow for eye-level visitation with key figures, or old friends. This distinctly anthropomorphic medium offers an efficient route towards connection. 

The images are laser-printed on large pieces foam board, and their veritable scale acts like a vision-aid, with each minute detail rendered astoundingly legible—even at a glance, realer than real. They are highly intimate, inciting quiet moments of reflection; but more than that, they are surprising, a revelation. I am taken aback by my own response: awe and grief mixed with the sense that something dear has been recovered.

Bellamy and Fauteux are not photographers by trade; rather, photography as a medium presented the most straight-forward means of opening this line of inquiry. Each work is a view into a new environment, towards an interaction with a distinct tree, seen in its own right. With fellow patrons amongst these trees, the sense of collectivity gains new meaning for me.

Each photograph is framed with lumber sourced from the same species as its subject. This deliberate choice may not be immediately obvious, but once detected, the reality of this formerly living material resonates within the work, somewhere between effigy and relic. The representation of each tree is supported by its after-life as wood, prompting us to reflect on our relationship with them, both as material and living things. What are trees to us and what are we to them? Why do we care about them, ignore them, or harm them?

Some of the trees here are displaced, species that are non-native to the environments in which they now are found—a reminder of colonization that raises complex questions around human expansion. Under colonialism, many plants and animals were relocated from their original contexts for the benefit of humans, often with unintended consequences. In the artists’ home of Aotearoa (New Zealand), they found intersections of these reverberations, across centuries, continuing to ripple into humans’ relationships with the ecosystems they inhabit. Each portrait of a tree carries with it a story.

The boreholes seen drilled in the trunks of Pine I and II demonstrate the resistance to a simplification of environmentalist values. This species, native to North America, was planted as a carbon offset by a community in New Zealand. A neighbour, bound by their understanding of invasive species, worry, and sense of duty, deposited poison in their trunks to kill the trees, vitiating their lumber, along with the labour and care taken by others in their cultivation.

Introduced from Japan to New Zealand, bamboo took root in the experimental colonial gardens of Sir George Grey. Bamboo was introduced as a resource for extraction, with hopes of generating the wealth necessary to expand and sustain a new settler-colonial community in New Zealand. Evidence of the complexity of our interrelations and the disconnect between intention and outcome, Grey’s colonial expansion simultaneously functioned to generate care for his burgeoning community and immense harm to the original ecosystems and inhabitants of the land.

The pale yellow and green shoots of Bamboo I and II are inscribed with notes, initials, and heart symbols. Even in their authors’ absence, these declarations remain, allowing us to interpret the markings, their symbology and origins. Distinct from Sir George Grey’s intentions, visitors repurpose his additions to the landscape, using the bamboo trees as a shifting mortal canvas upon which to memorialize their hearts’ focus. The images illuminate the ways in which humans’ dedicated efforts to care for one thing can be detrimental to another. We leave our mark–it’s in our nature.

In Trembling Aspen I-V (Sturgeon Lake), the human-made marks serve another function. Daubed with identifying numbers in bright orange spray-paint, the aspens stand sentinel to climate-change science, offering insights and warnings for our collective future. 

The trees featured in Bellamy and Fauteux’s Collective exist because of human intervention, planted or transplanted for a purpose. The reasons, though largely self-serving, vary from aesthetics to material production, and knowledge-building. In weighing humanity’s influence, a complicated truth emerges: Where there is harm, we may also find intentions of care.