Seduced By Trees:
The Life & Art
of Sharon Carvelle
"My passion? To awaken people to the reality that all species are dependent upon our planet."
(Click Images to Enlarge)
“I was seduced by a tree.” Sharon Carvellé’s intimacy with the subject is clear in her art: mesmerizing trees that move the sky, dance, break into human form, copulate, then suckle the sweetly rounded breast of our planet, She-Who-Nourishes-Us.
Carvellé’s life and art speaks eloquently for the earth, humanity and freedom of the arts. Her Tree People exhibit was shown at the collapse of the Berlin Wall in that city, but she’s also no stranger to personal revolution.
In the late 1980s, she led a petition drive to save a 150-year-old Crackleaf Willow in Shooks Run Park from destruction by city bureaucrats who deemed it hazardous and uninsurable. “It was a ‘Friend to the World’," recalls Sharon. People gathered to tell stories about the part it had played in their lives—playing around it, making love, even marrying beneath its branches.”
Carvellé solicited an arborist to testify to the tree’s health but the city fathers still ordered the mammoth 60-foot, 76-inch diameter tree destroyed. On that doleful day of whining saws, Carvellé joined friend Vicky Miller—who’d chained herself to the tree—as snipers watched from area roofs.
It was long before the world’s celebration of Julia Butterfly’s famous occupation of an old forest tree in the Northwest, captured in a later acrylic by Carvellé.(right).
“The police called me a dirty, rotten pinko commie and arrested me for failure to desist and disperse,” she says, but also acknowledges that the city eventually passed an ordinance supporting the identification and protection of the area’s oldest trees. Carvellé wrote her own tribute, a book on natural history.
The CNN-covered act of resistance wasn’t the first or last time Carvellé rocked the leaky boat of complacency. Her provocative one-woman show at Guaranty Bank, featuring a series of erotically entwined trees entitled “Song of Songs,” was disrupted by bomb threats for its reference to a book of the Bible. Although nothing irreverent was intended in her paean to the divine nature of sexuality, 32 of the 600 etchings were stolen.
