Galit Shvo: For the Trees  |  Curator: Merav Rahat

A two-dimensional metal rectangle.

Split in two. Bend. Split in two. Fold.

What is the minimum point at which a surface becomes “tree”?

At what point does the methodical repetitive action become chaos?

Galit Shvo deals with the morphology of trees, appropriating the growth principles of fractal natural structures such as leaf veins, plant roots, blood vessels, and more, as a starting point for creating organic-industrial objects. In the gallery space, she places a series of metal structures resembling the growth processes of a tree – a trunk structure that splits again and again, and branches that gradually become thinner, preserving the formal principle of division into two at each split point. She brings together the laws of wild nature with mechanical industry and digital technologies, examining aspects of fixed development patterns and ways of disrupting them.

For hundreds of years, artists have engaged in the act of looking at a tree, and its deconstruction, abstraction and reconstruction, in a dialogue that takes place around the consistency of growth structures in nature. Starting in the 15th century with Leonardo da Vinci, who recorded the branching pattern of a tree that has a fractal structure; through Piet Mondrian, who simplified complex organic forms into geometric compositions as part of a search process for the “element of things”; Bruno Munari, who made schematic drawings of the growth modes of a tree in his book “Drawing a Tree”;  Yaacov Kaufman,  who grew fractal natural structures from the material he cut from the roots, in his series of Bonsai trees; and others.

Shvo, who comes from the field of industrial design, examines the growth structures of a fractal tree by running a constant algorithm on industrial metal surfaces. Her work begins with a two-dimensional rectangle as a basic shape, and gradually develops into controlled-wild tangled structures that she presents in the gallery space. By placing the objects in compositions that can continue indefinitely, she creates the beginning of an organic-urban environment that can be placed in interior spaces where humans live and work.

Shvo’s work takes place within a broad conversation on the relationship between humanity and nature, and is concerned with people who strive to return to nature but do so through unnatural means. In an era of deforestation and the loss of natural resources, Shvo operates by industrial means, using the growth patterns of trees that are disappearing to create a mechanical organism.

In the movement between extinction and creation, and in the face of new technologies that enable the creation of virtual environments and virtual images, she places tactile structures, preserving the contact with physical matter in experiential-useful objects that can develop in fractal growth and endless folding.