How to Move a Tree

Picnic Collective

Recipient of

2023 Ellis Bouregard Project Grant 
2024 Space Gallery Kindling Fund 

The name Picnic Collective emphasizes the idea of being together, utilizing whatever infrastructure may exist for collectivity. A picnic is a place where we find nourishment wherever we find each other. In a picnic, the foods brought together don’t always make sense. A picnic is about everyone gathering, and bringing whatever it is they wish to share. The result is a collage, and that’s what makes it beautiful. Frito’s and fancy olives don’t make sense together, but a picnic lets them be together. Like a picnic, we explore artistic methods that allow for collectivity and collaboration while encouraging difference. 

We then developed “How to Move a Tree,” a text score fashioned as a poetic “how-to” guide, using a tree as a metaphor to engage ideas of uprooting, transplanting, and finding agency and community. We invited a group of Maine-based artists to manifest this score in their chosen medium. All of the artists in this publication are “from away”—not originally from Maine. Thus this project is a catalyst for us to think about how we connect to ourselves, community, and Maine through the realization of this project.



My contribution: 

HOW TO MOVE A TREE is, for me, at its core a metaphor; a way of thinking about the elusive process of change, growth, and belonging through the idea of a transplanted tree.

In approaching this score and in thinking about sound, I found a playful visual relationship between western staff notation and that of a plant: the staff as soil, note-heads as seeds and blooms, stems and beams as stalks and rhizomes. I began by translating the ten steps into a hand-drawn animation of musical images, thinking not just about the steps of the score, but the space in between. I thought about silence, breath, and time as part of growth. I thought about roots and rhizomes, about one becoming many. I thought about what we let go of to focus our energy on growth, and the ambivalence of those choices. I thought about the sometimes inexplicable nature of getting from one stage to another.

The images that follow are a collection of stills from this animation. They capture moments of suspension, action, and ambiguity. They are meant to suggest states of being, and while one could use them as instructions to generate sound—and I do plan to use them as invitations in sound-making— I see them as poetic, playing with musical symbology to activate the space between thought and sound.