Aurelia Duplouich
I made this series during spring 2020, at the very beginning of lockdown. I was staying in a farm in southern France where confinement was very strict, and all I was allowed was taking short walks around the farm. I started noticing pine trees dying because of recurring droughts due to raising temperatures in the region. And so, despite the beautiful landscapes around me, there was that sort of slow, underlying threat everywhere. Seeing many trees dying or already down in the forest was incredibly shocking. We have this image in our mind of big forest trees as solid, and almost eternal beings crossing time untouched. I wanted to show the fragility of nature and that sort of constant intertwining of life and death, which is so much more visible there…and now.
I used branches and sticks collected from dead trees, and drew with the ashes and natural charcoal from the fire I made with the branches, giving them a second life.
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