Unbroken Arbor Vitae

Times4 is four Portland Artists, Anne Greenwood, Diane Jacobs, Shu-Ju Wang, and Rachel Siegel, who collaboratively designed and created Unbroken Arbor Vitae for the Suho Memorial Paper Museum. The installation focuses on reverence and regeneration of our forests. Using native woodlands of the Pacific Northwest as our guide, we transformed the 2nd floor of the Paper Museum into a place for viewers to experience a forest through sculptural paper trees, photographic scrolls, poetry, an artists’ book, a video focusing on renewal and the natural elements, and writings & drawings by community members about their experiences of the forest.

Each component of the installation was designed towards a specific goal. The sculptures of life-sized paper trees offer visitors the physical experience of walking in a forest; they will observe a new generation of plant-life, of ferns and fungi, supported by majestic trees; they will encounter a poem by American poet Alison Hawthorne Deming on the rich web of life. Twelve large photographic scrolls present a visual feast of native Pacific Northwest trees.

A 6-minute video loop focuses on life-cycles, using the burning of a paper tree as a symbol for renewal & regeneration. It is a gesture, a gift to our ancestors and future generations. A clamshell artist's book contains pages of actual Pacific Northwest native species wood blocks and allows visitors to touch and admire the grain of different trees, as well as serving as a reminder that it is possible to use our forests intelligently to ensure continuity. The community engagement workshops offer adults and students the opportunity to meditate on their personal forest experiences, to respond visually and linguistically to their relationship with nature and ultimately to consider their individual actions that impact our natural world.

This site specific installation was created for the Suho Memorial Paper Museum in Taipei, Taiwan, and was on view from October 6, 2014 through January 3, 2015.  Unbroken Arbor Vitae was reconfigured for a second run in Oregon as the featured installation in Chasing Paper at the Lake Oswego Festival of the Arts on June 24, 25 and 26, 2016.

A big thank you to the following people and organizations for helping to make this experience possible:

Suho Memorial Paper Museum - Vic, Daniel & museum staff, Regional Arts & Culture Council, Eric & Ruby Cheng, En-Hsin Wang & Frances Bai, Sean Wang & Karen Kao, Shu-mei Wang & Wen-chung Lin, Melinda Kowalska, Mrs. Wei, Mauricio Rioseco, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Claire Carpenter, Min Hsu, Mr. Gentile & Roseway Heights 7th graders, Lan Su Chinese Garden, Gary Wilson, Seth Healy, Maggie Lim & Garden staff, and our families!