DENDROCHROMA

The images in Bettina Harvey’s series Dendrochroma re-imagine the science of dendrochronology across the experience of the aging human mind, and the changes over time in personality, perception, and emotion. Where dendrochronology accounts for the life span and variances of a tree through counting and analyzing the concentric rings that circle through its trunk, Harvey’s pieces use colour gradients to suggest the imprint of the past on a person’s aging experience.

Dendrochroma grows out of Harvey’s earlier series, Drift, renderings of driftwood branch collars that represent her father’s experience with dementia. Dendrochroma continues to use driftwood pieces to reflect the evanescence of memory, but Harvey’s new series expands to investigate the aging process of her mother, who does not suffer from memory loss, but whose stories nevertheless bear witness to the subjective and fluid nature of memory and personality. Like the circles in a tree’s wood, some of her memories loom large—seasons whose impacts are so deeply felt that they are engraved in the mind. Other memories are less dominant. Mere traces, they mutate or shift colour over time—the blurred rings of a past that has been absorbed by changing perceptions.

Atop her acrylic gouache colour gradients, Harvey draws intricate graphite images of driftwood collars, whose densely overlapping tissues remain as evidence of the central structure and fibre of a tree that has survived in some form or another after the long journey of life. As ephemeral elements of the driftwood fall away, left intact is some fundamental shape of the original organism, like a person who at the end of life embodies their most essential self. Harvey often layers ribbons of colour across the driftwood to signify life-changing events, and the ways in which the aging experience is stratified by recollections of the past. Invoking the mood of past eras—the punchy brights of the early eighties, or the blending techniques of nineties design trends—the colours in Harvey’s series represent the imprint of bygone eras on the mind and personality.

Bettina Harvey would like to acknowledge that she is living and working on the traditional unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples, specifically the scəw̓aθən Tsawwassen First Nations.