Wind into the Roots
Written by Pierre Bongiovanni, exhibition curator
Chosen from thousands, the photographs gathered here present different aspects of the procession of trees that accompanies Muriel Pénicaud in her forest explorations, seeking the myriad facets of human nature and the primordial resonance of life.
The forest is perhaps the last place that unreservedly evokes the layers of human destiny, calling us to a final awakening. The photographer does not attribute human feelings to the trees.
As always in her work as an artist, she favors the enchantment and incredulity, even the astonishment, felt in her relationship with the trees, which allows her to access a profound dimension of who we are and how we are doing, both literally and figuratively.
She embraces a bold form of forest transcendence that opens the doors to memories buried in the dark and intriguing undergrowth of childhoods, legends, and thwarted domesticities. By looking at them, she invites us to understand what, in our lives, contributes to sustaining the world as well as what contributes to destroying it.
Here, one encounters monstrous embraces, vertiginous intertwinings, plant cavalcades, excesses, and unexpected trances. But also the elegances and flashes of brilliance that exist alongside the abysses and their torments.
We are reminded that one of the disastrous results of the pact between King Gilgamesh and the creature Inkidou (half animal, half divine) was the murder of the giant Hombaba, lord of the great Cedar forest. Since then, human vanities have continued to destroy forests in a trembling epiphany, like those that precede apocalypses, as there have been so many in the long millennia of our history. Humans rush to their doom, forgetting the vital co-evolution between them and the trees for hundreds of thousands of years.
The trees she seeks to photograph are undoubtedly intermediaries between two worlds: that of undulating passions and that of fragile eternities. Their telluric power is such that it forces us at every step to revise our criteria for thinking in order to try to live up to their apparent immobility and their senseless patience.
Water, earth, and air mysteriously combine there. And what alerts us here is how she questions our humanity by way of the trees. She does not photograph the trees. The trees "speak" to her about us. And this exchange, via her gaze, between them and us, invites us to greater humanity.
Here are the gnarled Beeches, heirs to a chaotic and mysterious destiny, prostrate, bushy, with short trunks that mock their common beech brothers, perceived as dominant, sometimes tyrannical (nothing grows under their foliage), with haughty elegance, and who made the heyday of clog makers and paper pulp manufacturers.
Here is the Common Hornbeam, at home everywhere, under all suns and comfortable with all soils, whose magnificent wood allowed for axles, hubs, mill gear teeth, press screws, masses, mallets, robust tool handles, as well as the most solid butcher's cutting tables.
And then this Wild Cherry, a wild cherry tree with its bark in satiny circular strips, whose fruit is disputed between children, blackbirds, and starlings. The Ancients recommended its use to treat apoplexy, epilepsy, and to develop the famous Kir from Clairegoutte in Haute-Saône.
And the Oak with the healing bark, confidant of the gods, link between the sky and
the great depths. The priests deciphered the voices that pass through its leaves. It allowed the construction of ships leaving for the Americas, but also cathedrals, barrels in which great wines slumber... A fundamental tree that provides society with an inexhaustible reserve of soul.
And this magnificent Birch, with its milk-colored trunk, called the people's well by the Russians because it provides heating in winter, light with its bark rolled into torches, and healing with its sap. Birch forests, natural refuges for wolves, lynx, bears, and lovers who engrave their names in its tender bark.