Ice Tree / Studio Cube

During an unexpected and severe ice storm in 2020, a tree still holding its green leaves became a temporary canvas. I set up my projectors and mapped colorful, animated light across the ice-covered leaves and branches, filming the projections as I moved around the tree. By the following day, many of those branches had snapped and fallen to the ground. The work grew from responding to what was happening around me, capturing a fleeting arrangement of ice, foliage, and light.

In 2024, I returned to that footage through a series of studies on my studio cube. This mapped projection surface served as both a digital sketchbook and a working canvas, a place to test light compositions and discover how imagery changes when it meets a physical form.

For these studies, I turned the footage upside down and mirrored it across two faces of the cube. That shift unlocked layers of faces within faces. I see elves in these forms, their features emerging from the frozen leaves, branches, and projected color. The movement of my camera in the original recording remains part of the work, carrying the imagery across the cube’s surfaces alongside the animated light.

I began exploring mirrored tree imagery during my Green Box artist residency in February 2020. Working with my photographs, I became fascinated by the geometry and faces that appeared through reflection and repetition. Some of those forms echo encounters I’ve had in non-ordinary states of consciousness, giving these experiments a resonance that is both visual and deeply personal.