256 pages, 9.25 x 6.5 inches, stitched, softcover, dust jacket, spot colour with fore-edge printing.
Font: The book is typeset in Walbaum and Trees, an original typeface created by Katie Holten. The Trees font is available to download for free here.
Designed by FUK Design Studio, Berlin
About Trees grew out of a series of drawings made for the group exhibition About Trees at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland, October 17, 2015 – January 24, 2016.
Limited edition offset prints available here.
Texts by Andrea Bowers, Inger Christensen, Tacita Dean, Amy Franceschini, Charles Gaines, James Gleick, Fritz Haeg, Amy Harmon, Natalie Jeremijenko, Eduardo Kohn, Elizabeth Kolbert, Irene Kopelman, Ursula K. Le Guin, Robert Macfarlane, Arianna Occhipinti, Katie Paterson, Pedro Reyes, Robert Sullivan, Rachel Sussman, Nicola Twilley, Gaia Vince, Aengus Woods, Andrea Zittel and others.
Robert MacFarlane writes “There is no lone tree language, but a forest of tree languages.”
In ABOUT TREES, Katie Holten invites us to enter some of these forests. She has created a Tree Alphabet and used it to translate a compendium of well known, loved, lost and new writing. She takes readers on a journey from ‘primeval atoms’ and cave paintings to the death of a 3,500 year-old cypress tree, from Tree Clocks in Mongolia and forest fragments in the Amazon to Emerson’s language of fossil poetry, unearthing a grove of beautiful stories along the way.
ABOUT TREES is the first book in Broken Dimanche Press's series: Parapoetics - a Literature beyond the Human. Recognizing a crisis of representation as our species adapts to life in the Anthropocene, About Trees considers our relationship with language, landscape, and perception.
The result is an astonishing fusion of storytelling and art, which celebrates trees and our understanding of them, their past and their future, their potential and their ubiquity. It is a book to leaf through, again and again.
Katie Holten is a visual artist and resistance fighter based in NYC and working in the world. She grew up in Ireland and studied Fine Art, History of Art and Complexity at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, the Hochschule der Kunst in Berlin, Cornell University in New York and the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. In 2003, Holten represented Ireland at the 50th Venice Biennale with a solo pavilion presentation entitled Laboratorio della Vigna. Other important solo museum exhibitions include the New Orleans Museum of Art in New Orleans (2012), Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane in Dublin (2010), The Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York (2009); Villa Merkel in Esslingen (2008), Nevada Museum of Art in Reno (2008) and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2007). She has conceived major public commissions including for New York City’s Grand Concourse (2009-10) commissioned by the NYC Parks Department, the Bronx Museum and Wave Hill. www.katieholten.com