ARMELLE SKATULSKI

INTERSECTIONAL GRAMMAR: TREES

Hackney Gallery - 25th November to 8 December

“Intersectional Grammar: Trees" is a group exhibition curated by UK based artist-photographer and poet, Jacqueline Ennis-Cole (Slade School of Fine Art, UCL).

Artists

Wendy Aldiss | Jesse Alexander | Heloise Bergman | Colin Buttimer | Peter Coles | Steve Ferrier | Joanna Furniss | Sam Laughlin | Frankie McAllister | Alan McFetridge | Gideon Mendel | Sabrina Merolla | Georgia Metaxas | Miharu Micha | Dawna Mueller | Lotte Scott | Armelle Skatulski | Sabes Sugunasabesan  

Press release

At the heart of the exhibition is a celebration of trees through the ancient craft of storytelling. The exhibition highlights the significance of trees within a complex network of relationships, helping to communicate our collective aspirations towards peacemaking as an often overlooked form of climate action.

Forests and Trees are our more-than-human relatives. We share fifty percent of our DNA with them. Trees breathe out (oxygen) the same element that we need to breathe into our lungs for our collective survival. Trees and forests remove carbon dioxide (or greenhouse gas) from our polluted atmosphere and then store that carbon in the soil, in their root systems, in the structure of their leaves and stems, and in the trunks of the tree. Forests and Woodlands are home to diverse species, and though we do not always dwell in these nourishing places, we do honour and pay our respects to these storehouses of vitality. Forests and Trees are places of refuge, places to slow walk, and/or places to listen. All nineteen participating photographers-artists, located throughout the UK and Europe, have unique visual stories to communicate. 

Jacqueline Enis Cole, 2024.

Exhibition Opens: Monday 25 November to Sunday 8 December 2024; 12.00 to 16.00

Closing Social Event: Sunday 8 December 2024 between 12.00 to 16.00.

Venue: Hackney Gallery, 1 Lower Clapton Road, Lower Clapton, E5 0NS.

Intersectional Grammar: Trees was made possible through the generous support of Jacqueline Ennis Cole. 

Press coverage: 

Times Series: https://www.times-series.co.uk/

Artist statement for Generated Forest (2024) @ Intersectional Grammar: Trees

Generated Forest (here) is a series of ‘generated’ photographs made with the text-to-image generative AI Midjourney with textual prompts produced using ChatGPT to speculatively represent the conservation work undertaken by the Bezos Earth Fund in the Congo Basin. The project stems from an interest in how visual generative AI tools rely on extractive practices.

The development of text-to-image generative AI models is dependent on the extraction of rare Rare Earth Elements (REE), including conflict minerals mainly mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The computational power required to train such models demands excessive amounts of water and electricity, which leads to increased carbon dioxide emissions, while GenAI models feed on the scraping of 'publicly' available online imagery to accumulate large data sets, which presents risks to privacy, intellectual property rights and the future value of cultural work.

The ‘generated’ image is the aesthetic or surface effect of the algorithmic grammar of AI and of black-boxed computational processes, while the textual prompt and the invisible labour of the ‘prompter’ are part of its infrastructural bedrock. The textual prompts produced through generative AI are laden with a mythologising tone that is used ironically in this project, while the artist's original prompts are kept unseen. Collage and juxtaposition are the prompter’s practice and means of framing the objet-généré [generated objet trouvé or found object] within a new context. Generated Forest seeks to explore the twisted circularity of a leader in ‘cloud’ computing undertaking conservation work, and by extension, how generative AI tools such as Midjourney, or Amazon Titan, are partaking in the cycle of extraction-computing-environmental damage.'

Statement © Armelle Skatulski, 2025.