What makes a tree, a tree? This series of eight short videos explores this question by focusing on the same urban tree, a large Black Willow situated between a busy pedestrian walkway and a construction site. With deeply grooved bark and a twisted trunk, it bears scars from lost branches, supports parasitic plants and has holes bearing evidence of animal inhabitants. I was drawn to it as embodying life, death, aging, regeneration and nurturing.

I approached the videos as if they were poems; distinctive, concise, lyrical and focused on a different aspect of the tree. Each video was given to a different composer as an experiment on how audio affects the perception of imagery. As the tree has been destroyed since the start of the project, these now serves as elegies.

The six audio artists were chosen for their diverse approaches to sound. I've left one silent and made the score for another using only audio samples from my footage of the tree.

The composers are: pianist Eve Egoyan (eveegoyan.com), percussionist and composer Debashis Sinha (debsinha.com), sculptor John Dickson (johndickson.ca), musician Max Turnbull (badgeepoque.bandcamp.com), artist and creative technologist Dan Tapper (instagram.com/visualcodepoetry) and Meg Remy, a songwriter and vocalist (yousgirls.com).