Vicki Mason, Canopy installation, 2024, Australian Design Centre, photo: Amy Piddington
In conversation with the Australian Design Centre, Vicki Mason describes the concern with the vandalisation of suburban trees that motivated her current work.
Melbourne-based Vicki Mason has been a contemporary jewellery designer and maker for nearly 30 years with a dedicated focus on plants, trees and nature. Growing up in country New Zealand, she was instinctively drawn to plants. “I spent my whole time pulling plants apart, making perfumes from plants, dissecting them, pressing them. Gardening was huge in our family, plants were always a topic of conversation and I was taken around to see many beautiful gardens.”
Her work Canopy, which occupies the Object Space at ADC from 6 June to 20 July, looks at the issue of large tree vandalism in Australia and its effect on urban environments. Vicki’s miniature hand-crafted trees and houses are made to be worn as brooches or pendants and she is encouraging people to get involved and sign this petition to recognise trees as important natural assets.
✿ What is the aim of Canopy?
It’s about raising awareness. My work is always about what I’m seeing and living. For example, where I live in Melbourne, the house across the road that was a family home for many years was bought and two big roughly 200-year-old trees were poisoned. The council fine for this was $930. A $4 million new home is being built, so they probably include the cost of fines in their total budget. Pretty much every week I hear chainsaws running, it’s just really depressing. I think people are starting to really go, No, it’s not right. And we need to speak up.
✿ Is each tree in Canopy based on a particular tree?
Initially, I was very literal, I had 14 or 20 trees that I was going to try and make. But when I came to actually do the techniques and make them, that had to go right out the window. I’ve never worked that way before. Usually, it’s a direct translation of an idea but I had to be flexible and go with the experiments. So the little bright green one with the loops I have called “Chestnutty” because it’s like a chestnut tree but not exactly.
✿ Why do you think people respond to miniatures?
It’s a childhood hangover—it is for me anyway. I think there’s an intimacy that comes with things that are hand-sized or smaller. And when you have to focus on something small, it’s a different way of thinking and the stimuli are different, it’s asking different things of your brain and your emotions.
✿ What do the small seeds signify?
In the Canopy installation, one side is blue with lots of trees and the windows in the houses are cool colours based on thermal heat map photographs that I found really beautiful. The other side is orange with very few trees and the final house has a red window with a treeless yard. It’s actually quite a confronting show but it ends on a positive note with the ‘Seeds of Hope’ series of works. The cast tree seeds (oak, ash, beech, magnolia, wattle etc) are symbolic of regeneration and the need to maintain hope in the face of destruction.
Vicki Mason. Picturing strawberry trees
You are encouraged to sign Bridget Kennedy’s petition to recognise trees as natural assets.
