Memory Tree

one of the things I was working on before the car accident and my life became all consumed with insurance stuff and getting my husband and son home safely from the dessert, Nic Bridges and I had been commissioned to make a "Memory Tree" for the Alzheimer's Memory Day Walk along the beach front in Wollongong.

In our eagerness to get stuck into it we forgot to take photos of the frame which was a base of wood and twisted wire.
While I was getting the basics of the frame started Nic painted many metres of Tyvek, which is a plastic type paper that shrinks, distorts and bubbles with heat. Some car covers and forensic police overalls are made from this.
We stitched big pieces together for the trunk of the tree then hit it with a heat gun and it did magical things distorting and bubbling, we then wrapped strips around the branches and hit them with the heat gun and it shrunk beautifully around the twisted wire branches.

Here it is at the beach when we first installed it.


Throughout the morning people wrote their memories or loved ones names on leaves that were tied to the branches with ribbons.


Here's Nic and I at the end of the day

We were also given a booth next to the tree to showcase our art, we both had some small art quilts, Nic had paintings and I had sculptures and fibre pieces

What better way to spend the day than with the sound and smell of the crashing waves