A forest of signs
If there is a central image in Stephen Birch's oeuvre it is the tree. The tree appears numerously and obsessively throughout his recent work. Of course the image of the tree in art is by no means a new thing. In fact the tree is fundamental to the Romantic-Humanist tradition from Caspar David Friedrich to Van Gogh to the early works of Mondrian. For these artists the tree symbolises energy that binds the earth, connecting it with the transcendental regions of the heavens. It indicates natural flows with which the artist identifies as an equally natural, god-like producer in the greater scheme of creation. For Birch the question is entirely different, especially since the collapse of dominant humanist models. In fact Birch's work is imbued with a poststructuralist sense of suspension. On the one hand the artist is indebted to the artistic tradition from which he draws; on the other those traditions have been thoroughly questioned, particularly over the last twenty years.
As a result Birch's sculptures hover in a realm that is simultaneously affirmative of tradition and equally questioning and dissociated from it. This quality is typical of Freud's concepts of neurosis and the subject's attempts to maintain conflicting viewpoints of him/herself and of the world, without relinquishing one for the other. While Birch's work suggests psychoanalytical readings it is equally ironic in its self-consciousness. Like post-structuralism the art work is revealed as primarily synthetic and a locus at which multiple texts conjoin forming its meaning. That meaning is complex and open to a variety of interpretations. Birch's works refuse simply to coalesce as rhetorical symbols, instead a poetics operates throughout them. This is not however a poetics of... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline