Myrtle Tree Arts Journal

From underground fungal networks to the secret communications of native plants, our new musical performance imagines some of the hidden conversations and mutual relationships happening all around us. When the Land Speaks, Who's Listening? In California's foothills, where systematic conversion has stripped away much of our native riparian habitat, something remarkable persists: the intricate web of relationships between plants, pollinators, and the soil itself. It's here, in this landscape of both loss and resilience, that The Botanist: A Plant-based Song Cycle takes root. Each season has its ripening—a time when seeds break from their shells, when black crows and phoebes feast on millions of seeds, when tight young buds burst open with endless colors, smells, and flavors. This is the world of Ripe Area , our one-day festival celebrating the profound interdependence between humans and the native plant species that sustain us. The Science Behind the Songs What began as an...

RIPE AREA is a play on the term "riparia", the land adjacent to and influenced by water. The waters of the South Fork of American River tumble downstream in the crush of ice melt, rushing in currents, propelled by dam releases, and slowing along sandy flatlands. Wet, fluid fingers fan out among cattails, quietly seeping into sodden ground.  Over time, h umans have changed the river, eroded its banks, mined its tributaries, drained its meadows, and farmed its floodplains. The waters of the South Fork of the American River , for example, are contained by t hree major reservoirs and other smaller man-made reservoirs  El Dorado County. The major dams are  at  Slab Creek Reservoir built in 1967, Chili Bar Reservoir built in 1964 and Folsom Lake Reservoir built in 1955 .  Headwaters of the South Fork of the American River collect in high-altitude Lake Audrain, captured in the image I created, above, for the music and underwater sound art installation, Music for 33 Dr...

Arriving at Fort Worden sent me on a hunt about fortification history and architecture. Following trails through the woods to the top of Artillery Hill, Paul and I encounter the ramparts, solidly built gun emplacements known here as “batteries.” “Bulwark” is another term that feels related to the work from my first week at Centrum: large pencil drawings of entangled old growth cedar and spruce branches and roots. The “bul-” part of bulwark is related to bole, “tree trunk,” while -wark is related to English work, wrought, and wright.  The last of the guns at the fort were removed in 1945, and the defunct battery enclosures, tunnels, stairwells, rusting doors and pipes, lichen-stained concrete, a stately sign with the name, Cornelius Tolles, a captain who died from his wounds in a Civil War battle—comprise these eerie tombs. We start to hymn and sing into the dark reverberating chambers. “What a performance venue!”, our eyes circling in their sockets as we imagine the possibilities....

I begin with pencil and paper. Simple. Meditative, airy gestures make marks and smudges . Alternating light and heavy pressure. My eyes try to study forms and shadow. Squinting and relaxing my gaze. Playing with seeing and not seeing.  Drawing involves continuous choosing, extracting and generalizing, while trying to dance across the paper. The inspirations are coming from walking in a very small fraction of the vast temperate rain forests on the Olympic Peninsula, Washington. I'm choosing to notice the stability of old growth spruce and cedar in Quinault, the twisted movement captured inside roots, bark, veins, and eroded paths along the Sol Duc. Man-made entanglements formed into artificial log jams fortify the banks of the Hoh. Artistic partner and spouse, Paul Godwin and I are on a trek, each day taking a bike ride into the bracing wind, and or a hike as light fog settles between the trees. We spend a night in a lodge next to a very still lake. My bathing suit fills with fin...

The present is just a moment in the continuous unfolding of perceptions and experiences. In meditative practice, I actively try to observe the arising and vanishing of the present to develop the skills to be in the present with deeper awareness. Similarly, the rapid passing of frames of video, the interweaving of streams of images and sounds, is for me, a way of observing an ephemeral present. "Right View" by Ameera Godwin   In this state of mind, I can start to experience a quality of "right view.": seeing what is true, and discerning how to respond, compassionately, ethically. I try to cultivate a relationship to temporality, "as an on-going purposeful effort to create one’s time and keep up one’s sensed continuity in time," as described by Estonian researcher, Kätlin Pulk . Working with digital video and using various non-narrative film approaches, my raw materials are the moving pixels with attributes like duration, speed, frequency, synchrony and as...

Paul Godwin & Miguel Noya (Dogon) Music for FIRE/LAND: Knowing the Territory has been a huge part of the creation process for this "Art Rock Opera for the Forest." We began with a gorgeous and somewhat somber composition that came about in 2018 when Miguel Noya, the Venezuelan electronic composer attended our artist residency at Talking Tree Ranch in Placerville. The composition is routed in a repeating piano pattern nested rhythmically in the key of C# minor. There is an interwoven melody taken up by piano, then violin and finally a synthesizer enters with a counter theme -  swirling, gorgeously rising with an inherent longing and perhaps, sadness. The piece was not released until now, when it found a home in the opening FIRE/LAND  Overture – recast as “Whichever Way the Wind Blows.” The piano ostinato will return again as a foundation for “A Moral Dilemma” and then “We All Play a Part” as our Finale.  How does one create music for an “art rock opera for the forest”...