“On a recent trip to Central Australia, I couldn’t shake the idea that a tree does not decide where it grows. It springs up wherever its seed lands, on a cliff, under a boulder, in the middle of a riverbed. The earth may change around it, but where that seed has germinated and taken root is where the tree will live until it dies. In the case of farmed trees, their life is cut short. Eucalyptus sideroxylon (Ironbark) is most likely the wood used as the structural pillars you see in this room, quietly coexisting with us since the early 1900s. Do you think it appreciates that, of all places it could have ended up, it's in an art gallery?

The sky is green, the trees are blue is a tangible soliloquy of my feelings towards trees.

I’m thinking about all the things that come from trees. Honouring the trees that gave their lives for the buildings we inhabit, the plants that we eat, crush, add chemicals to to turn into plastics, paper and almost everything we use. I’m thinking about the microscopic and molecular structures within tree DNA and natural processes like Thigmomorphogenesis, a process in which strong wind or heavy rain stimulates the tree to change the way it grows. Sending the roots deeper, or strengthening the trunk. Here, salvaged wood forms a windchime, a tree once again stimulated by wind, creating sounds reminiscent of my childhood. Superstition serves as a human evolutionary process to comprehend unpredictable natural phenomena. In the Philippines, many mythical beings and folklore tales are tied to the environment, particularly the Kapre, a mischievous tree dwelling giant. When my dad migrated to Australia from the Philippines, his grandmother warned his parents against living in a house with a large tree in the yard, fearing a Kapre residing there might harm them. The pair of large beaded feet, constructed of found bamboo, represent the Kapre my family avoided.

This series examines the sessile property of trees, once rooted now unbound from their geography. In The sky is green, the trees are blue, material is offered to exist with a new purpose, a new life after being grown, chopped, milled, pulped, carved and discarded.”