At March's end, the storm came down,
And broke my leaves with rain;
Yet in that wild, celestial hour,
I did not dream of pain.
I was no more a potted thing,
Forgotten, small, alone —
I was a tree the heavens loved,
By wind and water known.
The world had sung around my stem,
The rain had named me bright;
For once, I felt that I existed,
Burning softly in the night.
Then morning cleared. No hand returned.
I slept where I had lain —
A little life, by heaven lent
One dream before decay.
Dreams arrive like tides,
slowly drowning the outlines of reason,
until even silence
begins to take on the texture of water.
The tires hum a low, steady prayer against the gravel.
The field is too wide, the noon too bright —
a rush of wind presses me closer to the earth.
I am moving fast, but inside, everything has stopped.
It's raining again, and I'm still thinking of you.
The window forgets the city — only the water remembers.
Longing arrives like a tide,
slow, blue, and without permission.
Through touch and imitation, I use the body to trace these fleeting correspondences. The images are fragmented and dispersed across the zine: bark, branches, and bodily details remain suspended between pages without forming a complete whole.
Text appears only partially — obscured or delayed through layering and sequence, allowing reading to move between recognition and absence.
i. bound · with thread
ii. spread · branches, body
iii. fan-fold · standing
iv. in hand · held
v. branch · facing poem
vi. spread · undergrowth
vii. zig-zag · standing trees
viii. cover · the space that disappears
ix. opening · colophon
I attempt to reconstruct my relationship with nature through colour, texture, and fragmented forms. Pigment is left to find its own path: it pools, retreats, blooms into the fibres. What I place is only half of what appears.
Fragments are cut apart, displaced, and reconnected through the folds of the book — leaving the work suspended between formation and dispersal.
“The work remains suspended between human intervention and natural process — like a trace only briefly held in place.”
The cover is a piece of fallen oak bark, lashed to the spine with raw linen and a sprig of dried twig. It is not a metaphor for the forest; it is a fragment of it, carried indoors and still damp at the edges.
The pages inside are pulled from rag and plant pulp by hand — uneven in weight, flecked with seeds and ash, refusing the smoothness of any printed book. The first poem is pressed directly into this surface with a manual typewriter, so the keys leave a small bruise in the fibre.
Not part of it —
yet not apart.
The book closes around its question the way bark closes around a wound — not to hide it, but to keep it alive.
"What if the wild I sought was never wanting — but only patient, waiting for illusion to fade?"
I sat before a tree and spent an afternoon writing one hundred questions. The questions began as direct address — what are you, what do you need, what do you remember — and gradually moved toward something stranger, a kind of complicated reflection the tree was not actually being asked to answer.
The book is printed on handmade mulberry paper, whose fibres and vegetal traces hold the texture of organic growth. The cover incorporates real tree bark: rough, irregular, refusing the geometry of a book. An accordion binding lets the pages unfold continuously, so the questions extend through the rhythm of each fold.
Reading becomes a slow movement through unfolding space and time. The questions remain independent yet loosely connected; you can enter or pause at any point. I wanted the questioning to remain unresolved — language placed before nature, continuously circling the presence of the tree through the limited scale of human understanding.
By the seventieth question the tree has stopped being a subject. It is just there, and the questioning has begun to fold back on the asker — every line a small admission of what cannot quite be said in front of something so plainly present.
The book itself follows that arc. The bark holds the opening; the pages thin as they unfold; the language presses lighter into the fibre near the end. Read all the way through, the zine ends where it began — closed, quiet, almost refusing to remain.
This is the one that disappears: a publication that does not want to be remembered as a publication. It wants to be left, like the tree was left, mostly to itself.
The zine is meant to be read out of order — the gaze drifts, the layers slide. Tracing paper holds the image at the angle of its making and lets the next page show through, so two moments are present at once.
Nothing is finished here, and nothing claims to be. The eye on the cover is also the eye that closes it.
i
iiiii
iv
v
vi
The lines were carried out of the woodland on paper, and after a while I brought them back. Hung between two branches, the zine stopped being a fixed thing — it opened, folded, trembled, and at times disappeared into leaves.
Suspended between paper and tree, it was less a publication than a brief gesture of returning what had been taken.
A bound volume of pencil drawings, Latin marginalia, and lines that come apart as you read them. The book opens, breathes, and lets language settle out of itself like silt.
Some lines twist like questions never spoken,
others hold their curve like memory
I cannot drop —
between them forms a logic felt,
i n h a b i t e d.
It does not ask to be understood — only stays, unwavering, not to please, but to
I walked slowly into a nameless forest, where the air carried a breath that had never been
Light filtered through moss and the murmur of water, folding layer upon layer into my chest, until the boundary between my body and the world could no longer be
I heard my own footsteps turn lighter, like the heartbeat of another creature. I touched the bark and felt it as an extension of my own skin. Nature was no longer a scene, but a manner of being.
‘Among passing instants, untethered presences drift into a shared, shifting clarity’
The canopy is not a backdrop — it is a field of small, separate arrivals. Image fragments are cut and reset across the spine because that is how the moment actually moves through me: not whole, but as discrete instants briefly sharing the same air.
The hand enters the frame, reaches toward what is already there. The tree does not turn to meet it. It grows, it withdraws, untouched by my brief approach. I am only placing myself within its field.
Standing among the figures and the trunks, I begin to feel that the air tilts; my posture loosens into a gentler accord. The stillness here was not waiting for me. It was already in place — older than my nearness, and indifferent to it.
A real thread crosses the spine, pinning small photographs on one side to a single figure on the other. It is not metaphor: it is a working sketch of how the moment gathers its shape — not in me, not in the tree, but held briefly in the air between.
I leave without firmer answers. Only a faint sense that something has shifted — not the tree, not the air — but the way I now hold myself inside the world. The book closes on this small divergence: a space, quietly rearranged, and left that way.
The spine is exposed deliberately. Each signature is sewn through with linen using a revised Coptic stitch — an original adaptation of the ancient chain binding. Every knot, every place where a thread crosses, stays visible. The structure is the argument: nothing hidden, nothing finalised.
The pages turn flat and free, the way a small moment opens without ceremony. Kent paper at 140 gsm holds the ink lightly, and the bound spine lets each spread sit in its own time, then close back into the whole — a brief architecture needing no interpretation.
I leave without firmer answers, only the faint sense that what passes between myself and these quiet forms belongs to no act of knowing — a stillness older than my nearness, tilting the air and loosening my posture into its gentler accord.
The tree keeps its own nature — growing, withdrawing, untouched by my brief approach. I only place myself within its field, and it is not the tree that shifts, but some small alignment in me.
This book grew out of a question I could not put down: what is my relationship to the natural world, and how has my understanding of it been shaped — and limited — by the frameworks I inherited?
What I had taken for closeness was, in many ways, a projection. The recognition became the engine of the work — a movement from an intuitive bond toward critical questioning, and from there into posthumanist thought.
I chose the word palimpsest as the governing concept because it describes exactly what happened to my thinking: each new encounter did not erase the previous one but wrote over it, through it.
what is nature to me?
what is what is my relation to nature?
and can the very word 'nature' — this category I inherited — still hold?
Before language, there was pull. A pre-verbal closeness to leaves, soil, the smell of rain on stone. I trusted it without examining it.
This was the first writing on the page — soft, certain, unread.
I read. The closeness I had trusted became visible as something — a frame, a habit of thought. What I had called nature was already a human shape laid over the world.
The page is being written over. The first lines remain, faintly.
I move into the territory where the categories themselves loosen. Not just how humans relate to nature, but whether human and nature can still hold as separate names at all.
The page is now thick. Each layer present in the others.
These are the words that arrived during the inquiry and stayed. Each one is a small palimpsest in itself — a borrowed concept I keep returning to. Hover to read the gloss.
Pages of newsprint and translucent tracing layer through one another, so that every spread is haunted by the spreads above and below it. The exposed butterfly binding lets the gatherings open completely flat — each opening becomes a section of sediment laid bare.
To turn a page is not to leave the previous page behind. It remains, visible through the next, the way thought never truly leaves an earlier thought.
"The visible is pregnant with the invisible." What you touch is the surface; the invisible is the lining — the subterranean rhythm, the endurance of time that supports what you see.
In Merleau-Ponty's late writing, chiasm names the way perceiver and perceived intertwine without becoming one. A handshake: two palms can never fully overlap, and it is precisely the irreducible gap that lets them reflect each other.
The forest stops being a dead object. It becomes my secret counterpoint — a living abyss that invites me in.
I cannot become the tree. My hand will always remain visible against the bark. But this failure is not loss — the distance between us is what allows the tree to remain itself.
The gap I tried so hard to close is precisely the space where ethics lives — where the other is allowed to persist as other, not consumed by my longing, not dissolved into my understanding.
The covenant: not mastery, not merger, but witness. To be one form of life, present beside other forms.
A hand-bound artist book on the unstable relation between the body and the tree — a quiet study of proximity, waiting, and the limits of closeness.
Closeness does not require possession.
Coexistence does not require fusion.
To remain beside something whose depth cannot be fully entered.
Each step a deeper attention, each step a recognition of what cannot be crossed.
Rather than presenting nature as scenery, symbol, or emotional refuge, the book treats the tree as an independent presence with its own rhythm, scale, and opacity. The body does not enter the tree, possess it, or become one with it. It only remains near — touching bark, following branches, lowering itself into the field of the tree.
This nearness is never resolved into unity. It is held as a pause, a tension, a condition of coexistence.
What approaches expects alignment, a quiet yielding, a narrowing of distance. Instead, the space holds. Not firmly, not defensively, but according to its own order.
Materially, the book reinforces this idea of fragile proximity. The exposed spine, loose threads, textured paper, grey cover, and low-contrast images all resist polish and closure. The book feels held, suspended, slightly unfinished — as if its form were still negotiating between object, trace, and environment.
The long, narrow format recalls a fragment of bark, a vertical body, or a folded interval of landscape. To stand with another form of life without claiming it — to accept relation as something partial, temporary, unresolved.
Before I know what I feel,
I draw.
A line arrives first —
lighter than speech,
closer than memory.
It carries the weight of a passing thought, the warmth of an unnamed feeling, the quiet distance between myself and all that I am touched by.
For me, illustration is not a way to describe the world, but a way to sense it more tenderly; to let the inner weather become visible, and to find, in each fragile mark, a breath shared between myself, nature, and another gaze.
A private sketchbook — opened. Watercolour and pencil drift across spreads, where my consciousness meets the forest's. Trees become bodies. Bodies become trees. Something between us is always listening.
Negative emotions are often on the verge of collapse — they erode my original self and occupy my body like evil spirits. As a holy land for self purification, the "home" absorbs and filters the evil soul into a pure "spirit" to achieve redemption.
In the seam of London's map lies a pause —
where strangers drift, breathe, witness.
In Elephant Park, time exhales.
We are fluid, fleeting, one.
The grass remembers nothing,
yet we leave carrying light.
Everything softens. Everything slows.
Take it slowly.
Drawn from direct observation, this composition traces the rhythms of public gathering within the park's courtyard. Figures are rendered as discrete yet interconnected presences — their postures and interactions mapped across an open spatial field. The layering of fine line and translucent colour records not only the visible arrangement of bodies, but also the intangible atmosphere shaped by light, movement, and collective pause.
A book hidden inside a tree.
The tree has never held a singular identity within human civilisation — material, symbol, landscape, resource, object of belief — each meaning continuously layered and overwritten. Using the tree as an entry point, this work reconstructs tree installations by fourteen contemporary artists, examining the shifting relationship between human and nature.
The publication is embedded within a real oak stump carved with a geometric cavity. An 8 × 8 cm hand-bound book rests inside, concealed beneath a biomimetic wood-grain cover. Joined through hidden magnets, the stump closes into a silent fragment of wood — all human intervention receding behind the bark.
The exposed-spine binding allows the pages to lie completely flat. Reduced to an object-like scale, the act of reading becomes intimate and bodily.
To remove the book, to read it, and to return it to the stump becomes a small reenactment of the human desire to enter, interpret, and reorganise nature.
