Beauty bonsai: Sydney’s new suburban street art

Bonsai is an art form that has a reverence for nature. It seeks balance, harmony and a true expression of the spirit of an individual plant. Pretty much the antithesis of the Ausgrid approach to pruning street trees clear of power lines then.

So why does photographer Garry Trinh call his images of chainsaw-deformed street trees Giant Bonsai?

“The idea of the giant bonsai came to me one day when I was stuck in my car in pouring rain under a huge pruned tree in Auburn,” he explains.

“I’m usually on the move, walking, or driving, but I was still – stuck there – and I really looked at the tree I was parked under, the way it had been cut. The notion of it as a giant bonsai came to me and made me smile.”

Trinh liked the idea and went searching for more “giant bonsai” to photograph. His first series of images was shot on photographic film in 2005-2006.

The latest series is digital, online now as part of the Antidote festival, tomorrow at the Sydney Opera House.

Most of the images are of brush box, Lophostemon confertus, the most common tree in Australia’s urban forests. There are also camphor laurels, figs and one extraordinary golden cypress.

When Trinh saw a tree he liked, he would keep returning to it until he happened upon it unobscured by parked cars, with the sun from the right direction and a blue sky contrasting with the vibrancy of the foliage.