EMILY HILDEBRAND

My Grandfather, an Astrophysicist (Who died from Covid last year) taught me that we and everything we know is built of conglomerations of Stardust eternally forming and dispersing. That means that we are all connected with all other life on Earth, for we are made up of the same dust particles. We might dance together again, swirling stardust in another form, it is not impossible.

During the Pandemic lock downs, the masses of people escaping the constraints of their homes to the life of the forests got me thinking about the essential and intertwined needs of life on the planet. We need the trees for more that just product, they are vital to life and instinctively we go to them when we need comforting.

I got permission to carve some of the small offcut logs left from the giant stacks of logs being prepared by the foresters. My ongoing project is to carve them and install them in public forest spaces where people could make rubbing prints from them and eventually leave them to decompose into nurse logs to create habitat for other life to grow out of them. This log carving is the first log carving of the series. I present it as an artwork on its own and also as an interactive performative piece where I will make rubbing prints from the log carving and invite visitors to give it a try. The signed prints cost 50 CHF with 30% going to support Visarte Zürich. Come and feel the swirl of stardust.