TROY RUFFELS, stones tides weeping trees
'When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert. New responsibilities declare themselves…. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless Earth.’

- Robert McFarlane, 'Underland'

  • 'Stone Tides Weeping Trees' is a visual and poetic response to the Miena Cider Gums of Tasmania's central highland plateau...

    'Stone Tides Weeping Trees' is a visual and poetic response to the Miena Cider Gums of Tasmania's central highland plateau and Lake District. Walking on the plateau, through bone gardens of rock, moss, and bleached wood, I feel a sense of melancholy. 

    - Troy Ruffels

  • Cider Gum We are all of us light. Can you see it? The camera holding its thimbleful under our noses....

    Cider Gum

     

    We are all of us light.

     

    Can you see it? The camera holding its thimbleful

    under our noses. None of us – leaf, bone, river –

    any different.

     

    The sun’s sharp stream of it enters our skin,
    and beside us as well as before us, through the aeons

    without us, it has poured into tree branch,
    bird song, the escarpment playing its rush
    against the weather.

     

    It breaks now into this slight touch, the man
    with the lens tilting his eye just enough that his ear,

    too, can hear the chatter of its colours.
    His out-of-kilter hands, lips swollen with longing,

     

    pause awhile, that his tongue

    might remember the trace of him

    in the knit and the rot of the leaves.

     

    We are the day’s slow fall into darkness.
    We are the tree-shaped memory of our years,
    the trees, though, eclipsing the span of us, the riot

    of their wooded rise, the twist and turn
    of their diversions, tips parting the sky, wrapping us

    in their wonder.

     

  • They are not human, these trees. Why then are we in love with them? Here, the stark remains of their...

    They are not
    human, these trees. Why then
    are we in love with them?
    Here, the stark remains of their spidery forms

    crawl across the highlands, leaving the man

    hanging on the loss
    he has stitched into his silence.

     

    The air hums with their collapse,
    the dust packed with the scent of their slim survival –

    hints of ruddy-pink bark mottled
    with silver-greys under the once-emerald
    ghosts of their pendants.

     

    The limbs are as bare now
    as his reach is for their grace, as empty
    as his strength, in the teetering of his steps,
    as if the weeping of his pulse might bring them back.

    And he would. He would bleed for them.
    Bleeds for them. On the walls.

     In your gaze.

     


    - Kristen Lang

     

     

  • There is a weight in the atmosphere. A weight I feel comes from impending loss, from the absence of something....
    There is a weight in the atmosphere. A weight I feel comes from impending loss, from the absence of something. These trees contained the span of living memory in their branches and roots, but many now lie silent, and those that persist are struggling.

    - Troy Ruffels

  • Song without voice One must learn to be still awhile to hear it – the tenuous solidity of the rock...

    Song without voice

     

    One must learn to be still awhile

    to hear it – the tenuous
    solidity of the rock
    tumbling in the river of time.

     

    Stacked. Upthrust. Its now-

    eroded self, cracked
    and tilted, in the stretched-out

    eddies of its surrounds, tangled

    in the layers of the weather.

     

    From seed, in this moment
    of a place, in sky-grip in the wrench

    of the Earth’s spin, are the young-

    old trees, feet hunched

     

    under moss and scrub, the lichen

    curled into backwaters and the rock

    feeding it with its old-new

    arrival.

     

    One can sense, in the stitch-and-un-

    stitching of each

    miraculous form, an undercurrent,

    all and everywhere, opening into touch,

  • alive at the fingertips with the tug of the cosmos, the self strewn into the lift of the coiling breeze....

    alive at the fingertips
    with the tug of the cosmos,
    the self strewn
    into the lift of the coiling breeze.

     

    The song of it spreads
    past the reach of the vocal cords,

    wavelengths billowing out with the tides

    of the moon, and of the moons, star

    rippling into stars and the swing
    of the universe.

     

    Such a small thing – the stream
    along the stone’s shifting ground trickles
    into our cells, rising into cloud, and to breathe

    is to be, again, always,
    the plateau itself.

     

    The plateau and beyond.

     

    Each shape

     in the haze of all the others.

    The Earth’s

    sublime embodiments.

     

     

     

    by Kristen Lang

     

     

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  • Troy’s strength is to see, in the connection he feels, not an icon or a moment but a fragile glimpse of that from which all our moments come. The precise existence of this stream, this tree, this stone, enough to halt us in our tracks, is embedded in something larger – time, the chance of life, a chance we are here to honour. Troy works with and despite his photography, each image becoming not a memory but a pulse, one his work causes me to reach my hand into that I might feel the flux of its weather. It’s this that led to the poems I wrote in response to Troy’s work. Poems that, like the images, like our exchange, exist by some means neither of us are really clear about. Somehow a gap in the machine spat out the chance of it. Perhaps you’ll be as surprised as we are. We hope you’ll share the sense of what lies behind them.

     

    - excerpt from 'What is it we reach for', exhibition writing by Kristen Lang

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