Last April I decided to festoon a tree in the yard with hopeful spring words some taken from poems I love (mud-lucious!) and from some of the languages I've heard spoken in my neighbourhood. It had been such a long, cold winter and it dragged into spring. The photo of the robin in the snow covered tree was taken April 15th. I thought of the strips of paper as prayers like those hung at tombs and temples, shrines and stupas. I replaced some words as the wind and wet took them away and removed them all at the end of the month. I didn't think anyone really noticed but when the weather improved and I began to work in the yard, people would stop and comment on the tree and mentioned how they found it touching and thought provoking.I was working with a collection of musical scores this winter and was taken with the way that some composers choose to give performance indications. In particular there were two Canadian composers, Rose Bolton and Kati Agócs who used really evocative language and it reminded me of Eric Satie. And I called them Les Filles de Satie....
The first set of words going up this year are taken from compositions by Les Filles, they are painted on the backs of test prints for musical scores and are augmented by a few origami birds. As the weather has it's way with them they will be replaced in an ever shifting composition of whispering words and paper wishes.
