Tree Drawings

These drawings are a part of an on-going project entitled Sap Works.

Sap Works is an intimate study of the interwoven connectivities between bodies of trees and human beings, specifically the female body. This work intricately studies Bloodwood trees and the sap that they excrete by mapping stressed Bloodwood trees across the Sunshine Coast region and stress within the artists body.

These ‘stress exchanges’ become a series of intimate durational and ritualistic performances, derived from MacLeod’s ancestral lineage to Celtic/ Gaelic culture, landscape and language. Enigmatic sap pigment drawings are captured on handmade paper, a poetic exchange between body and tree.

Ogham, is the ancient Celtic language of the trees, and it is this ancestral knowledge that has been the conduit connecting MacLeod to this landscape after leaving the rural Hebrides of Scotland almost three years ago.

Sap Works is a process of re-connecting and understanding. Cross cultural narratives give meaning to the artists transitory belonging.