Suzie MacKenzie Fine Art

Hybrid digital print (monoprint + digital)
Limited edition of five

Collocation extraction is a tool used by linguists to investigate relationships between words. The collocates of the word ‘tree’ were researched and some of them are demonstrated here encircling a birch in Glen Loth, Sutherland.

Collocates can reveal how or why the way we 'feel' about a certain word is surprisingly nuanced. For example, a seemingly neutral word, such as 'cat', might be shown to be mostly co-located with the adjective 'black', thus giving the word a somewhat sinister aspect, even when it occurs alone. The collocates of 'tree' included the benign (eg 'Christmas'), the neutral (eg 'deciduous') and the sinister (eg 'hanged'). I printed a selection of the words in a seven-metre long 'ribbon' which I used to wrap the tree, wondering whether the words that would be readable would give a particular 'feel' to the completed image.