Cortextures.
Cortex, from Latin, means bark, rind, or outer covering. It protects the cells in the phloem and cambium layers that provide the crucial vertical life streams of trees: sugar downwards from sunbathed leaves; water and nutrients upwards from roots. Photosynthesis binds carbon to help stabilise our planet’s climate. Billions of microbes that live on the bark scrub our air clean. “Cortextures” invites us to look closer at the skin of trees upon which our lives and ecosystems depend.
I aimed to create a sense of the vertical energy, ecosystem services, and mystery of forests, my spiritual home.
This series of abstract images was created from sets of close-up photographs of the bark of palms, bamboo, and flotsam found on Samoan beaches in 2024. I first stitched 4-6 images together alongside each other. Up to 10 replicates of these panorama files were then each digitally altered before folding them all back on themselves in a ‘stack’. The stacks’ digital output settings (e.g. Range, Outliers, Variance), which are more often used for image diagnostics, are here used for aesthetic effects in their own right.
