Scar Tissue

From Covered in Snow, 2025

My instinct that the trees had been expressing warnings of danger was not far off. Trees have the ability to communicate danger amongst themselves, relying on their root systems and fungi to express danger to neighboring trees about pests. In The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, it’s explained that when a tree is weakened, its ability to communicate is removed, leaving the tree vulnerable to invasive insects and disease. Moreover, Wohlleben expresses that trees that grow in isolation, without neighboring trees, are inherently more vulnerable to disease. The trees that had killed Rachel and Sydney had also died themselves, leaving massive absences within their communities. The trauma of such a loss is detrimental to the overall health of the other neighboring trees. These communities can even express grief and will continue to feed sugar to the roots of their fallen friends, refusing to abandon their lost loved ones.

Throughout Ohio, trees with carvings in them decorate the parks. The names of lovers, dates, symbols, and statements scarred into their flesh. Drawn to this violent act of asserting dominance in the trees, I began photographing these engravings. Some stories became so heavily layered upon the bark that they eventually became impossible to decipher. Through photographing these flesh-like textures, I’ve found that they themselves represent the web of narratives that have been so heavily on my mind perfectly. More so, I resonated with these tales, stories that were lost through time becoming illegible as the tree healed.

Through the journey of creating my thesis, my own memory had been growing fuzzier. The layers of new memories over the years were pushing the painful ones to the background. In describing his project, Somersault Raymond Meeks states, “I photograph close to home as memory loses structure, its architecture, trying to make light speak from the fixed edges of rooms long vanished”(Meeks 2021). Meeks’ tender images explore his daughter’s transition from teenage girlhood into a young adult. By documenting this fleeting phase of her life, Somersault captured the memories of her youth. Similarly, photographing the landscapes wherethey spent their final moments has felt like an act of immortalizing the memory of the women tied to my research. While I was photographing these trees, tales frozen in their bark, internally, I was desperate not to forget the loss I had experienced. The act of returning to these parks mimicked the pattern of obsessively returning to the only memories I had from my pregnancy. I wanted to hold onto the grief forever, I would carve it into my own flesh if I could.

In my youth, I had perceived the act of carving as a destructive act, one I associated with self-harm. During my teenage years, I had used self-inflicted cutting as a form of grounding, a form of escaping the complex emotions I was encountering. This behavior was revisited in the months following my miscarriage, a reflexive pattern that offered a sense of strange comfort. My history with the act of cutting left me curious about how the act of carving into the tree impacted it, if this act was as violent as I associated it to be. According to the organization Leave No Trace, “Tree bark serves a similar purpose to skin. It acts as a protective layer, keeping bacteriaand pests out, and guarding cells. When a tree is carved into, this protective layer is broken, leaving an open wound, similar to us getting a cut on our skin. This wound leaves open the possibility of diseases or pests entering the tree”.12 While trees are capable of healing from these wounds, they are made unnecessarily vulnerable by the act of carving into their bark. The trees I saw in each park were littered with these engravings, entire forests made more vulnerable due to human intervention over decades. Their scarred flesh rich with layers of wounds from decades of abuse.

To a degree, I knew I was projecting my own emotions onto the trees, but I fully believed that the land had to be grieving the parts of it that were carved away. Meaghan Weeden of One Tree Planted states, “...(it’s) clear that even without nervous systems, trees on some level know what’s happening and even feel something akin to pain: when one is cut, it emits electrical signals and healing compounds–similar to how our own bodies respond to wounds”(Weeden 2025). If trees were capable of expressing danger regarding parasites and vermin with one another, they had to be able to communicate that their bark was being maimed in other ways.

My feelings about the act of carving into a tree were complex. For most of my life, I had found the act of carving a name into a tree distasteful, but my anger towards those who had done so was short-lived. The desire to make memory tangible was exactly what I had been yearning for all of these years, the ability to return to a memory and touch its scars. Also, I couldn’t ignore the fact that I existed in a creative field where the use of paper is vital. Trees acted as memory markers, even outside of the forests. Photography and written word have been the closest tools I’ve been granted to make memories permanent, but bookmaking is my way of making the complicated journey of grief into a form that could be touched and held. The assembly of this very book felt vital to concluding not only my research, but the complicated journey I had embarked on with loss throughout the past three years of my life. Every detail of existence felt vitally important. I returned to the dos-a-dos structure that I had experimented with in the project’s infancy. The structure could perfectly hold the tangle of narratives I was writing about, reflected by the image sequence on the opposing side. The light blue book cloth and soft yellow binding were chosen to mimic the forget me not flower. I chose to hand-sew the signatures of the book using a French twist, a binding that intertwines within itself as it crawls up the spine. Each of the pieces coalesced into a structure that itself was a Z-shaped web, holding the narratives together with tenderness.

Like inflamed scar tissue, my perception of the Ohio landscape continues to alter even when I believe it has healed. An itching that comes and goes as I struggle to understand what my journey with these women has truly represented and what meaning I’m meant to unearth from the loss I experienced. The trees of Ohio continue to sway over women who, like me, are using the woods as places of escape. Once, while hiking alone, my eyes caught a name near the bottom of a tree.

“ Katelynn, 07’ ”

While I may never know her intentions for carving her name, in 2007, there was another Katelynn, looking at the same tree and praying that the landscape didn’t forget her. I’ve continued returning to the trees for answers to questions I can’t yet formulate, and they respond with their stoic silence.