Naomi Simone

All of God’s Creatures

January 2024 - Ongoing

The United States of America

An homage to the relationships humans have shared with trees throughout the centuries.

All of God's Creatures serves as an homage to the enduring and complex relationship humans have shared with trees across centuries of history and diverse cultural contexts. The project considers trees as witnesses, resources, and symbols or entities that have been sites of labor, shelter, ritual, and desire, while also bearing the marks of extraction and erasure. Using cyanotype, a process historically tied to classification and early scientific imaging, I complicate notions of documentation by working from 8x10 negatives and integrating text through digitally printed negatives. The physical layering of image and language allows the work to move between record and reflection. When exhibited, the images were projected at approximately 9 by 7 feet onto suspended muslin, transforming the works into immersive, light-based encounters rather than fixed photographic objects. This shift in scale and material further destabilized the relationship between image and ground, as well as calling some reference to the size difference between humans and trees themselves. This allowed the cyanotypes to read as both monumental and fragile.