THE TREE, Grad Rahenburg, Brestanica, 2021

The tree is one of the oldest symbols in various cultures and eras. It is usually associated with positive meanings: new life, personal and spiritual growth, connection, change, development, but also transience, mortality and a certain finitude. On a symbolic level, the tree represents a ring or circle connecting earth and sky, birth and death; with its roots penetrating deep into the earth and its crown touching the sky, it actually represents the vital composition of the entire universe.

Culturally and historically, the view of the symbolism of trees varies, although the meanings are more or less similar. In Islam, for example, there is the Blessed Tree, which stands neither for the East nor the West, but for the centrality or centredness through which one attains blessings and enlightenment. The Bodhi Tree, under which Buddha attained enlightenment, also stands for sacred centrality, while in the Christian religion we know the Tree of Knowledge and its forbidden fruit. If we look a little deeper into history, into Slavic mythology, the oak stands for the world and the grove for a forest shrine. The Greeks believed that with every tree cut down, a nymph dies. Norse mythology tells of the Tree of Life – Yggdrasil, which stood in the middle of the house of the gods. In psychology, too, Carl Gustav Jung equates the tree with androgyny (integration of male and female principles) and subsequent individualisation.

So it is obvious that trees are the key to the creation of the world and the survival of man, not only in fairy tales but also in our lives, as they possess both healing and energy power. They produce oxygen, they are natural air purifiers, they provide us with building materials as well as the written word. Trees have the unique task of enabling humans and all living things to survive. In this respect, the Slovenians are among the greenest nations, with an average of at least seven hundred trees growing per capita. So we do not (yet) need to fear for oxygen.

The tree of life, the tree of knowledge, the family tree, the cosmic tree: this time Mateja Kavčič presents her personal “artist’s tree” in the form of an impressive spatial installation made of natural materials, which she has placed on the majestic beams of the attic of the round tower of Rajhenburg Castle, thus intertwining historical heritage with contemporary art. The open attic of the round tower of Rajhenburg Castle spontaneously reminds her of a tree skeleton, she says. With this tree, which is over thirteen metres high, the artist asks us to reflect on the dilemmas of modern man and the world in this – to say the least – confusing time we find ourselves in today. The works are created in a lengthy process accompanied by meditation, intuition, snippets, situations, recycling and patterns.

The artist directly touches on transience as a central concept of being: that is, time, materials and, of course, ourselves. Her theme of constant change, impermanence, disappearance, becoming and the infinite power of nature is tied to the traditional Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi, which primarily means a worldview oriented towards the acceptance of transience and thus imperfection. The artist has recognised herself above all in the conceptual features of the aesthetics and principles of the aforementioned wabi-sabi, which include asymmetry, roughness, simplicity, economy, austerity, modesty, intimacy and respect for natural objects and natural forces. “Wabi-sabi nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing is eternal, nothing is complete and nothing is perfect”. The contemporary meaning of wabi-sabi is often summarised as “wisdom in natural simplicity” or even “flawed beauty”.

Wabi-sabi can change our perception of the world so much that the crack in the vase becomes more interesting than the vase itself, giving the object greater meditative value. Similarly, ageing materials such as bare wood, paper or fabric become more interesting over time as they have a patina that captures memories or history through constant change. Mateja Kavčič also sees beauty in the dying leaves of the trees in autumn, with all the flaws of ageing – beauty in decay that is worth depicting.

Artist Mateja Kavčič acquaints herself with natural materials every day; she stores, checks, observes and recreates them. By observing the stored, pressed leaves of plants and carefully depicting each separate leaf, she shows an example of rejecting today’s too fast pace of life, because the process is the most important thing for her. The artist is thus in a constant but slowly progressing and very long process of perceiving the diversity of natural materials, which gives her work a distinct creative charge.

Mateja Kavčič likes to exhibit outdoors and has therefore already prepared several projects in situ. The beginnings date back to 1997, when she set up an open-air gallery in Tivoli Park in Ljubljana, hung her paintings depicting nature and allowed viewers to feel it under their feet and above their heads while looking at the artworks. Later, over several years, she created what she called intimate exhibitions for birds and a random walker. These were small, ephemeral setups made from materials found in nature. In these interventions, the artist as an agent completely “amalgamated” herself into nature in the Land Art manner.

But she also works the other way around: she draws the forest with charcoal from floor to ceiling on the gallery walls, as she did in the ZDSLU Gallery and the Krško Gallery. After the exhibitions, the drawings were always whitewashed, which is also an important aspect of her projects that speak of transience, emergence and renewal. A similar interweaving with archaic and non-classical gallery spaces is always a challenge to her. In the dynamic spaces of the Lapidarium of the Božidar Jakac Gallery, she intertwined and interwove forms made from materials found in the surroundings, leading the viewer into multifaceted stories about the harmony of man and nature. Her last performance at UGM Studio (Maribor Art Gallery) entitled Asylum was also very interesting. The artist built a real sanctuary in the form of a nomadic yurt, the dwelling of Asian nomadic tribes, bringing a natural touch to the gallery space and emphasising the importance of perceiving nature and its infinite forms directly. It offered the gallery visitor an escape from the real, “wild” world into the embrace of the peace of fragrant grasses and flowers.

The magnificent tree Mateja Kavčič exhibited at Rajhenburg Castle was created from recycled natural materials she had used in previous installations. The artist recycles her works several times so that new ones can be created. This time she used up almost all her recycled material, so she gathered new building elements as she went along: the structure of the tree is made up of clumps of marsh grasses and spheres shaped out of various grasses and willow branches. Kavčič collects the long, green, sharp-edged grasses that no one cuts down in the wetlands of Kostanjevica na Krki, brings them to the studio and ties them into bundles, which she first dries, then carefully packs and prepares for transport. In this way, both the integral part of the ambiental work or spatial arrangement and the small fragments in nature form a whole. So it is a very slow creative process where every detail is important. For the artist, the creation of the tree parallels the flow of life: slowly, with the experience already gained, she builds, progresses, matures; the steps are tiny, sometimes almost imperceptible. She is constantly walking along the edge, searching for a balance, a balance in life that is full of dilemmas and questions. Thus the latest installation The Tree is a complete, rich and independent organism, but also a small but necessary part of the forest that represents the union of the whole. It is the same as in life itself: an ongoing process of creating integrity through the synthesis of small fragments that the artist feels, touches and, not least, smells.

Mateja Kavčič has always believed in the circular movement of nature, in eternal repetition, the change of seasons, in a harmonious whole of which we humans are also an integral part. Basically, it is a Nietzschean “eternal return of the same”: it presents nature to the viewer as a model through artistic interpretation and thus indirectly comments on and criticises today’s blinded consumer society and its alienation from nature.

Nina Jeza

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