Trees Take the Cake at UWA

Organics still seem to be the order of the day at UWA with Susan Graves taking out first prize (and some others) with her work 'Chose Your Blossom' (above).
I was not sure whether Claudia222 Jewell's 'Strange Plant....Ugliness and Beauty' was a plucked chicken or a tree, but it managed to carry away a swag of prizes.

Soror Nishi's beautifully crafted Christmas Daisy Tree (below) was also amongst the winners (I've blogged about this one before).

I also took some pics of Silene Christensen's entry (below), which was also at the Art Maze. I don't think it won any prizes, but the list of prizewinners is getting so long I don't have time to read it right through. (Note to UWA: Next time please send out a list just of the prizes and winners - without extraneous text)

Trees at UWA

JayJay Zifanwe from UWA is always quick to let me know when there's a new and interesting tree at the UWA competition site. Thanks JayJay.It's great to see so many trees keep coming in this art competition.
So I popped over today to have a look at what's on offer and found Soror Nishi's Grove of Lantern Fruit Trees (below) to brighten my day.

Zola Zsun's 'Three Poodle Trees'(below) is a fun piece with sparkly diamond-like foliage and brilliant ground cover.

Cherry Manga's 'It's Raining in my Heart Like This'(below) (I think that's the title- my French is not good) is another work with humour and very well executed. I am a great lover of monotone so Cherry's work speaks to me. It rains just like that in my heart too, and sometimes all over Queensland.

There seems to be a lot of foliage around in artworks these days, as if we are all hankering for a bit of greenery. Anley Piers beautiful work 'Travel in the Shadow of Technology' is a nice bit of greenery (or monotonery)for geeks and techo nerds like me. Congratulations Anley.

And while it's not greenery or even vegetable I thought Corcosman Voom's birds deserved to be in here with the rest of the Nature works from UWA. I love almost everything Corco does and these are no exception.

So thanks for the heads-up JayJay. I always get a bit lost at UWA- but I think I found em all.

Soror Nishi New Trees- from strength to strength

Today I was lucky to get a sneak preview of some brand new Soror Nishi trees. What a way to greet the new year!
My favourite virtual tree builder is going from strength to strength consolidating her earlier work with a full mastery of Blender and a foray into particle canopies.
After what seems like an eternity of rain and grey skies, water and doom here in Australia Soror's trees were like a burst of sunshine.
Watch out for these trees when they come on the market- they're great. Shown here not to great advantage in a sandbox somewhere in Second Life- but they still shone.

Thinking Ahead

The Sunshine Coast Treeline project has finished for this year, but we hear that it will be back in 2012, so I'm starting to think ahead looking at ways trees are being celebrated with new technologies- in virtual worlds and in the real world. Maybe some ideas will come out of it for 2012.

The first is a brilliant tree build at the Museum of Singapore, traditionally associated with a grand old Banyan Tree, but now with a new, glowing metal contemporary take on the Banyan. The Farm site http://www.farm.sg/work/project/the_tree has images of the tree in the gardens, with people interacting in much the same way they might with a real banyan, as well as drawings and specifications showing how the tree was made.

The Breath of Life is another project over at Design Milk (http://design-milk.com/a-breath-of-life-by-fraser-ross/#more-61797) that caught our eye. While this first version isn't quite a tree yet, there are lots of possibilities here.Scotland -based artist Fraser Ross has used shape changing alloy and LEDs to create a plant that reacts to the carbon in the human breath. There's a video on the site showing how the plants light up, move and change. Pretty usual stuff in virtual worlds, but not so easy to do in real life.

Real/Second Life Crossover- Treeline Opening

The real world Treeline opened officially on Friday night at Noosa Regional Gallery in Queensland, Australia. The Treeline exhibitions will take place at various venues and all Sunshine Coast Galleries over the next few months.

Virtual Treeline is part of the Noosa Gallery show. A slide presentation documents the involvement of the project in Second Life and shows the work of all the artists who participated and showed work at the Treeline galleries in Second Life. A second slide show shows the virtual environmental artworks of Juanita Deharo.

There will also be several live presentations from Second Life to an audiences in the gallery.

Two books which have been published as part of the Virtual Treeline project, and are being shown at the gallery as part of the exhibition. The first is a pictorial essay documenting and making comment on the work of each of the Second Life artists who participated in the Treeline exhibitions, and smaller book shows the virtual environmental artworks of Juanita Deharo, with an accompanying essay. These books are available to be read or purchased on line at http://bit.ly/9ZluS9 or via http://www.juanitadeharo.com/Virtual_Treeline_artists.html
There are more images of the opening on the Virtual Treeline Flickr site.
Thank you to everyone who has supported this project, both in Second Life and in my own community. There has been tremendous interest and expressions of delight from visitors to the Noosa Gallery since the show opened.

Treeline V- Scottius Polke

For our last show at Treeline, everyone's favourite otter, Scottius Polke, has kindly and very carefully transplanted some of the trees and plants form his magnificent Lunamaruna build (at Project Z) to our Sky Gallery platform. It was done with care, and they seem to love the watery environment here as much as in Lunamaruna.
Scottius' trees, as with the work of many of our exhibitors in previous shows, reminds us that virtual worlds can have their own ecosystems, and their own plant species. Not everything needs to be a replica of the real world. Sometimes, in making and seeing new and never before seen environments we are better able to understand and appreciate reality.
Something in us responds to the notion of a tree, whether it is one of Jadyn's magnificent redwoods, or one of Scottius' strange but evocative virtual trese that survived its first transplanting, but can not exist in the real world.

Treeline V - Fuschia Nighfire, Jadyn Firehawk and Araminta Kroitschov

For our last show at Treeline we have welcomed back some of the artists from previous exhibitions.
Since exhibiting at Treeline in our first show Fuschia Nightfire (Nina Camplin) has gone on to develop her work in Second Life in a number of directions. We are pleased to be showing her small immersive installation that was a prize winner at UWA, and some of her evocative 3D work incorporating figures and trees.


Jadyn Firehawk was also part of an earlier Treeline show. For this exhibition she has treated us to a taste of majesty with her images of giant redwoods. These giant trees, some of the largest on earth, are a living reminder of how insignificant we are in the scheme of things, and yet how much impact we have had on the planet. For anyone who has not seen these giant trees, Jadyn's images perfectly capture the feeling of awe one gets looking at such a huge and very old living things.


We are also pleased to welcome back photographer Araminta Kroitschov, who is continuing to do wonderful things, taking photographic works off the wall and into installations. Her experiments with the possibilities of the virtual environment show just what can be done when creative people think of ways to bring together real life art practice and the tools of Second Life.


Araminta has also charmed us once again with her images that speak of the joys of human contact with organic things and our own close ties with the natural world. We all respond positively to the idea of bare feet on leaves, but it's a sensation many of us rarely experience these days.