VOID FRACTION - APerture inversion
charcoal from the fallen beech tree, paper, performance, moving image
July 2026.
Mari Rose Pritchard & Julie Upmeyer
Once tree, now carbon: chemically altered and separated from the tree’s own timeline of birth, life, death and decomposition.
Charcoal fragments and the repeated rotations of our bodies create the drawing. Moving image introduces sound, action and time loops.
As part of Coed Coexist at Plas Glyn-y-Weddw, an exhibition bringing together more than 80 artists, makers and craftspeople in response to trees, woodlands and our relationships with them.
Coed Coexist was initiated by Plas Glyn-y-Weddw in partnership with Pen Llŷn artists Junko Mori and John Egan
The charcoal was a new material within Void Fraction’s ongoing investigations into materials, transformation and time. Although physically derived from the fallen beech, the process of making charcoal had chemically transformed the wood, interrupting its expected trajectory from growth and life through death, decay and decomposition. Aperture Inversion considers this altered material as something simultaneously of the tree and no longer the tree. Through repeated movements of their bodies, the artists set the charcoal into motion again: turning, marking, accumulating and wearing down. Drawing became both an image and a record of these encounters between material and body, while the moving image introduces another cycle of repetition, sound and duration. Rather than attempting to represent the tree itself, the work asks what might happen when one of its transformed remnants is given another set of actions, relationships and timescales.
