Lisa Rappoport, “Tree Stories”
Artist Statement
Tree Stories is an homage to Bushra Azzouz, an award-winning documentary filmmaker, and to the eponymous film she planned and researched but never made. Bushra began gathering notes, research, anecdotes, interviews, and images for it in the early nineties. The archive fills a banker’s box and contains video shot in four or five now defunct formats, along with documents ranging from pictures of treehouses and postcards of cars driving through giant redwoods to articles about tree-sitters attempting to save old-growth forests to scientific reports on the effects of climate change on trees. The files are in three languages: French, English, and Arabic. When I interrogate this box, it readily yields its physical contents but keeps silent about Bushra’s intentions for the film, what directions she envisioned, why she dropped it. Like many creative projects, it exists more completely in the imaginary realm than in what we call reality.
The project is a collaboration by three close friends: Joe Lamb, who met Bushra in film school in 1983, and introduced her to me not long after; me, who felt drawn to her as soon as we met, that same year; and Andy Larkin, who became Bushra’s husband. In 2024, five years after Bushra died, we mused together about whether we could find a way to branch off from what does exist of this un-realized film and make something new of our own, which would at the same time honor Bushra and her unfinished film. We kept the title, and included some of what we found in the files; we curated a hodgepodge of bits and pieces which might not have made it into the documentary; we added our idiosyncratic mélange to what lingered.
The 24-page casebound book consists of poetry, essays, and quotes about trees, printed on handmade St. Armand Canal paper. The paper has an earthy, speckled oatmeal look and an inviting texture. The covers are Gmund Moonlight Glance, the deepest possible indigo sparkling with tiny metallic flecks, over boards, with amate endpapers. Amate, a renewable resource made from bark by members of a Mexican collective, gestures to one theme of the book, the effects of global heating on trees and their endangered status. The text is handset Centaur and Arrighi. Legend was used for the title on the book cover and the slipcase; it also appears on the title page, the only moment of green in the book.
A separate mosaic comprises 16 individual cyanotype prints which assemble into a 4.3’x3’ tree image. There are sleeves on the backs of the prints, across the top and lower edges, to enable dowels to be inserted for displaying the piece. Both the not quite realistic image and the saturated yet ghostly blue present a tree which is there yet not there, imagined and real at once. That giant composite tree began as a series of still photographs—much like film itself. The assembled mosaic folds to the same dimensions as the book, 13.25”x9”. Both parts reside in a slipcase constructed of the heavier weight Moonlight Glance. The edition is 13 numbered copies plus four lettered copies hors de commerce.
As the book artist and letterpress printer of the three, I inevitably took the lead; but I had invaluable support and concrete help from my colleagues. Andrew Larkin created the tree image; Joe Lamb wrote an essay and learned to set type to compose his own poem. The brainstorming over a two-year period led to a production larger and deeper than its individual parts or contributors. Our book is the outcome of our missingness and our scattered responses to the vast subject of trees; it is at most a call-and-response to Bushra’s intended film: an offshoot from existing roots which has found its own life form.
lisa rappoportCalifornia, USA
littoralpress.com
Tree Stories
2026
Handmade and mouldmade paper, handset letterpress printing, cyanotype
13.75 x 9.5 x .875 in slipcase; 13.25 x 9.25 x .5 book; 52 x 36 cyanotype mosaic (folds to 13.25 x 9.25)
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