I’ve always loved trees. Growing up on Tambourine Mountain in Queensland, I was surrounded by giants of all types – strangler figs, red cedars, old jacarandas . . . I spent a lot of time with them, climbing where possible and, at the very least, imagining some sort of fantastic, elaborate dreamscape involving tree-limb dinosaurs or some other far-fetched, tall-legged, long-necked creatures.

Melody Eötvös. Photo supplied

Trees were an escape for me and a safe place. A fun place too. I revelled, competitively, in being able to climb higher and faster than my siblings and friends. I remember discovering Italo Calvino’s novel The Baron in the Trees as a young adult, and it left me seriously wondering if I too should have found a way to just stay up in the trees and never come down.

As you can imagine then, trees have naturally been a loving and persistent presence in my creative work. It’s more obvious in some pieces than others, but trees – whether as a vast impassable forest, a haven for leafcutter ants, or a stoic pillar around which pinecones fall in perfect circles – are often there, in...