Red Tree

Geraldine Javier’s The Red Tree, (2011) engages with the way museum collections create cultural memory and reflect civilization. Suspended from the tree’s crimson branches, preserved specimens of dead birds lie on hand-woven tatting lace hammocks. The work was part of the artist’s solo show, Museum of Many Things at Valentine Willie Fine Art Singapore in 2011 in which she combined objects once owned by another collector with pieces from her own eclectic collection of fabrics, plants, animals, and popular art to imagine a different kind of museum experience. Here, vitrines and framed objects are intended to create new worlds rather than merely reflect the one we currently inhabit.

In Geraldine’s crimson tree of cradled birds, we might imagine stories of childhood and innocence or perhaps recall biblical references to Eden. We might read it as a memento mori or a warning about climate change and deforestation. Despite its references to museum collections and displays, The Red Tree, (2011) is not about institutional critique but about artistic potential and the power of found objects to channel worlds of imagination, humour, as well as pain.