As living organisms, trees have been providing essential services to humanity for millennia — as oxygenators, as carbon sinks, as shelter and habitat. The reality of a tree is fundamentally altered when it is harvested for wood. In its rawest form, wood is burned for fuel. But when wood is altered by the human imagination into an object of utility or of beauty, the story of wood-based arts and crafts begins.

Artist and academic Naila Mahmood and interior designer Zahra Ebrahim, the co-curators of ‘Ingrained: Wood in a Cross-Section of Time’ at Koel gallery, paired notions of time and beauty with the essence of trees. They invited the viewer “to read the language etched into wood”, although this task is not as simple as it sounds. Can one read this language in a way that is detached from the transformative activities that humans subject wood to?

Overt references to contentious contemporary issues relating to deforestation, lack of sustainable harvesting of timber, decline of forest cover, ecological threats to nature and urban heat island effects were excluded from the invitation. Diversity of form rather than polemics were showcased in this abundant and reassuring survey of botanical drawings,........

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