Sarah Bird, Cherry Hill Road Grove

-Dimensions: 27.5" x 41" x 1.5"

- Limited edition archival digital print, framed in whitewashed wood with UV-resistant plexi.

- Originally part of a 2019 exhibition at The Block Island Historical Society titled "Long-Term Residents," this remarkable series of photographs celebrates the stature of the island's oldest trees at familiar landmarks and on iconic properties. Sarah's practice has taken trees as media, mediators, material, and method. She writes, "My photographs are born of a deep connection and reverence for trees. They are refuge and sentinel, Steinbeck's 'ambassadors from another time.' These photographs are portraits, restoring the trees to their essential standing in our web of being. Long-underestimated by science, recent discoveries about their relationships, their sensory and memory capacities, and their abilities to communicate have shed new light on these stalwarts of the landscape."

- A luminous, mythic portrait of the grove of nearly thirty black cherry trees that line the edge of Cooneymus Road, just before Rodman’s Hollow. Cooneymus had previously been identified as Cherry Hill Road on historic maps, so called because of the naturally seeded cherry trees that took hold on the land in the 1940s, once farming and clearing had ended.

- Sarah has been visiting Block Island since her college years; her first exhibition there was Long-Term Residents: Trees of Block Island (Block Island Historical Society, 2019). She holds a PhD in Film and Digital Media from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a Scholar-Artist Fellow at Justus Liebig University, Germany, and is based in Mill Valley, CA, and Wellfleet, MA.

- A portion of each sale from this series will be donated to The Block Island Historical Society.