The Last Arborist 2020

single channel video 2:49min

I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land in which is video was made on, the Worimi people.

For the video The Last Arborist, the artist attempts to salvage a fallen tree and resurrect it in a still lake. Holding it up for a period of time as if meditating on it returning to life, the artist lets go and the tree crashes into the water.

The piece is a dystopian scene where the artist plays out the future role of the Arborist as the care taker of trees that are already long gone. Their revised role is to bring them back to life, an impossibility, yet hope in the minds of humans is all that remains.

The Last Arborist was made at Mungo Brush National Park at the Myall Lakes days before the national parks were shut as Australia was going into lockdown due to Covid-19. The artist had fled the city to seek solace in nature away from the havoc as peoples worlds crumbled, yet nature thrived from the humans misfortunes.