A great fire and whirling smoke

This talk examines the early modern aestheticisation of tree burls as a distinctive form of arboreal matter across early modern Europe and China. Although collectors in both traditions prized burls, they valued them in markedly different ways. On the one hand, burls were appreciated as luxury veneers for furniture and collectible objects. On the other, they were understood as anomalous arboreal growths—irregular and strange excrescences that emerged spontaneously on living trees. 

Drawing on ecocritical approaches to materiality, this talk reconsiders wood not simply as timber, but as living matter where aesthetic appreciation hinged on arboreal vitality. Placing European and Chinese engagements with burls in dialogue foregrounds an aesthetic that oscillated between seeing animate patterns in figured grain which evoked flames, smoke, and other natural phenomena, and as contorted arboreal outgrowths whose irregular forms embodied processes of growth and transformation. 

Part of the Art History Seminar Series, convened by Mary Roberts and Nick Croggon, and presented by the Power Institute and the discipline of art history at the University of Sydney.

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