The Sequoia Series has always been about scale, growth, and the kind of time a tree keeps that a person cannot. Not what a tree's life looks like, but what happens when you try to record it on different surfaces. The rings do not change. The story the paper tells around them does.

 

Seven end cut prints, one root question: what happens to a growth ring when the ground underneath it changes.

 

This body of work started as a technical question and turned into something closer to a conversation. I have been working from the same source, an end cut, printing the same rings again and again, but I wanted to know what the paper itself was contributing to the image. So I ran the block across two very different supports: lokta, a fibrous, slightly toothy Nepalese paper that holds pigment unevenly and lets it pool, and kitakata, a smoother Japanese paper that drinks ink in and gives back a flatter, more even mark. Same rings, same pressure, same hand. Different paper, different tree.

 

Silver on a blue deep enough to be that single moment when dusk turns into darkness.

 

Gold breaking across a saturated red ground, off-center, more fragment than whole.

 

Deep indigo with white rings and a scatter of fern fronds threading through, undergrowth caught inside the same light as the growth pattern above it.

 

Each of these came out a little different than intended, and that was the point. Lokta has its own texture and its own resistance, and it pushed back on the block in ways that other papers I have used do not. 

 

The kitakata piece sits apart from the rest, brown ink on warm cream.  Just a clean, almost archival record of the years. Putting it next to the lokta  made the difference obvious in a way that no amount of reading about paper weight or sizing ever could.

 

Kitakata behaves. Lokta has opinions.