with artistic collaborator Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy (Triage Live Art Collective)

2026-

A performance and workshop for children and their adults

Tree Dreams is a playful installation exploring the tree community of a local urban park. Tree Dreams asks, Why do we feel so much better after encounters with our green friends? 

What is it that we share with the trees? How is our wellbeing enhanced by being in their presence? The guided performance includes an audio soundwork and participatory tasks for children aged 5-12, their families and friends. The performance ends in the workshop where we will draw, make sounds and listen to the stories of the tree friends together.

PUU-UNIA occurs in a city park and offers audiences of all ages the opportunity to meet and reflect on the trees that surround them every day. Trees that exist for us in compromised and polluted areas, trees that share our lives within built environments. PUU UNIA asks us to consider how we can connect to these trees (and to each other) through collective acts of listening, looking, and drawing. It enables participants to explore their interdependence: human/arboreal, observing/resting, and rooted/moving. Trees clean the air for us, and here in the park, we can exchange looks and draw closer to one another. Nature encounters are often emotional and healing for humans, and we aim to explore this dimension (also known as forest joy, or shinrin-yoku in Japan).  We sense and remember each other through movement and gestures. Charcoal and paper will allow us to co-create large-scale communal drawings that are a sensory exploration of what we just experienced at the park. The kids will draw and create sounds by touching and drawing on a special instrument that Emma Fält has built. The instrument is based on a technique that enables kids to create a soundscape using found materials like sticks, leaves and stones. PUU-UNIA serves as a playful way to engage with multiple senses, to tune into the trees by offering moments of reflection.

In the summer of 2025, Fält and Kokkinos – Kennedy met and made a journey to Northern Savonia, where they developed the concept for a new body of work. Despite the enormous geographical distance between Finland and Australia, the artists find many cultural parallels in their contexts: fragile forest ecologies, the struggles of indigenous peoples, slow governmental responses to the climate emergency, and unchecked corporate access to forest resources.

About the collaborator:

Katerina Kokkinos-Kennedy is a Greek-Australian artist. Living in Australia, she has access to some of the wildest natural landscapes in the world and has a deep passion for them. Katerina is an expert arts practitioner in the fields of immersive, site-specific and participatory performance. Her award-winning works have toured nationally and internationally since 2011. Since 2019, Katerina’s performances have explored the impacts of the climate crisis, human relationships to trees, the sea and the care of humans at all stages of life. She regularly teaches, lectures and mentors artists at university level.