Elnara Nasirli
Further images
In Ghost Bark, the tree appears less as a representation of nature than as a material archive: a body upon which different histories of extraction, transformation and duration converge.
Its synthetic latex skin carries a particular contradiction. Natural latex originates as a secretion of certain trees; here, its industrial substitute returns to the vegetal body as an artificial membrane. Embedded within this skin are bark, iron and fossils, while ceramic formations resembling lichen gather across its surface. Organic matter, geological remains, mineral elements and manufactured substances become inseparable, unsettling distinctions between the grown and the made, the original and its substitute.
Each material introduces its own temporality. The fossil carries deep time; bark registers growth and shedding; iron anticipates oxidation; lichen evokes slow processes of attachment, symbiosis and succession. The latex holds these incompatible durations together, compressing them into a surface that seems at once preserved and in the process of becoming. The skin therefore operates not as an exterior but as a threshold. Matter passes through it conceptually: from living substance to industrial material, from organism to trace, from growth to fossilisation and back toward imagined growth. What appears to be a tree becomes an unstable composite of what it has been, what has acted upon it, and what might inhabit it next. Ghost Bark proposes that matter does not simply disappear when its original form is lost. It persists through displacement and substitution, carrying its histories forward— folded into other materials, other bodies, other times.
