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Artist to bring the language of trees to Maui

Dividing her time between New York City and Ardee, Ireland, artist and activist Katie Holten creates innovative, unconventional work exploring the intersection of art, activism, ecology, language and history.

Speaking Thursday, on "The Language of Trees" at the Hui Noʻeau Visual Arts Center as part of the Merwin Conservancy's Green Room series, Holten has created a unique Tree Alphabet and published the book "About Trees" several years ago.

With her Tree Alphabet, Holten reimagined the letters of the Latin alphabet as trees, assigning each letter to a specific species, such as A for apple and S for sycamore. She transformed the letters into dark-green arboreal glyphs, creating distinct tree forms for both uppercase and lowercase characters.

The idea came to her in a vision. "It was around 2 in the morning," Holten recalled. "Was I asleep? Was I dreaming? Was I awake? I don't know, but a combination of all those things, and in an instant, I saw it clearly. I had been making silhouette tree drawings in New York City, and I saw these letters, the trees appearing on the page, and I realized they were replacing the alphabet."

Holten later expanded "About Trees" into the anthology "The Language of Trees: How Trees Make Our World, Change Our Minds, and Rewild Our Lives," with parallel English texts, on one side and her tree language on the other.

"More than informative, 'The Language of Trees' is inspiring," praised The Washington Post. It "could change how you think about nature."

The anthology features over 50 contributors from around the world, comprising various perspectives and disciplines, with personal essays, poetry and even recipes.

There are quotes by Plato, Ursula K. Le Guin, Jorge Luis Borges, the band Radiohead, former U.S. poet laureate Ada Limón with her poem "It's the Season I Often Mistake," and scientist Suzanne Simard, who has described trees as having "a highly evolved system that actually has structures that are very similar to our brain."

Concerned about the environmental impact of printing books, she found a Swedish printer for "About Trees" that harvests from their own sustainable forest in Munkedal. "Their paper is called Munken," Holten explained. "They were able to tell me exactly which species of tree was going to go into the book and how many trees."

With "The Language of Trees," she found a paper that was ethically sourced, inspired by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Powers, who "changed the publishing industry," she noted.

Powers' book, "The Overstory," explored themes of environmental activism and humanity's relationship with the natural world. "His whole life changed because of what the trees taught him," said Holten. "He said, 'We can't print this book on paper that's pulped. We need to find really ethical paper.' We used the same paper that was used in 'The Overstory.'"

Over the years, Holten's kinship with the natural world led her to create a Tree Museum on Bronx streets, where yellow plaques on 100 trees displayed a phone number anyone could call to hear a local resident, gardener, musician or poet share a story about the area.

Her diverse body of work included building enormous papier-mâché globes depicting a changing world exhibited in Germany, and "Crack in the Real," a series of large-scale drawings exploring the intricate ways human-made structures and systems are interwoven with the natural world.

Excited about visiting Hawaii, Holten reported, "I was just at the University of Iowa and met four different professors in different areas who had all assigned my book. They didn't know each other beforehand, that they had done that. It varied from religious studies to art, bookmaking, international literature and English."

Her work is "all about trying to share a love, a yearning, a need that people have for learning and loving the world together in community," she said. "The book is about trees, but it's really about people and humans, and what it is to be alive on Planet Earth right now because we're in a very precarious, difficult, dark time in so many ways. Yet there's so much that can bring us together, and the beauty and the love, and that's what's going to save me and maybe, if we're lucky, all of us."

"The Language of Trees:" A Conversation & Workshop with Artist Katie Holten will be at 5 p.m. Thursday at the Hui No'eau Visual Arts Center. A reception with light refreshments and a book signing, with books available for purchase, will follow the talk. Tickets are $25 for general admission and $10 for students. From 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, she will hold "A Creative Workshop" at The Merwin Conservancy.