Untitled Document

Minna Kantonen

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A Small Book of Trees
Publisher: The artist and The City Gallery
Author: Minna Kantonen

Kantonen shares the English sentimentality about trees engendered by the Romantic poets. These trees are memorials to some ostensibly better age, the countryside dream of the 21st century’s city inhabitant. There is something optimistic about their survival; a battered Romantic ideal rooted on the edges of the city. It is the more dolorous specimens in the darker corners of the city that seem to be greeted by Kantonen’s camera with most affection.
The images of trees uprooted from their natural habitat demonstrate the inescapable gravity of the modern city. Across the planet rural environments divest their populations to the ever-expanding metropolises. As this vast rural to urban emigration continues a history of territorial identity is replaced by municipal chauvinism. Kantonen’s trees both illustrate and punctuate this tidal shift towards a post-territorial city society. They mark the end of our direct relationship to the land we inhabit and provide a point of connection to a time when the land, in some sense, belonged to us.- Hugo Worthy

80 pages, 38 colour plates, 160x127mm
Editor: Hugo Worthy
Book Design: Binod Tamang
Printed: Karisto
Printed in Finland
Essays by Paul Tebbs, Hugo Worthy and Taru Elfving

ISBN 978-0-9554095-2-3

A Small Book of Trees available to order from www.theshopfloorproject.com