Donna Bassin Stitches Kintsugi Into Photographs of Ancient Trees

Donna Bassin printed her tree portraits on large canvases and hung them among living trees at the Karuizawa Foto Festival in Japan. The series, Ancient Trees, forms part of her ongoing project Portraits of a Precarious Earth. Lenscratch published the work on October 23, 2026, as part of its Tree Week series.

The premise is simple and deliberate. Bassin photographs ancient trees with massive trunks, armor-like bark, sculptural roots, and twisted branches. She treats each tree as a portrait subject, staying with one long enough to notice the marks of its life. Knots, wounds, roots, and weather-scars carry traces of time. Her approach recalls Shinto practice in Japan, which recognizes the sacred presence of certain trees and places. Yet these beings, like California's sequoias, face an increasingly precarious future amid environmental degradation. Their age suggests permanence. They are, in fact, living and vulnerable.

The work is also grounded in ecology. Bassin notes that these trees sustain life beyond bearing witness to time. They store carbon as they grow over centuries. By photographing them, she hopes to invite a closer encounter with their presence and to recognize what is at risk when the living world is treated as distant or inexhaustible. The takeaway is plain: the trees have survived generations, but their futures are uncertain, and looking closely is itself a form of care.

What does the stitching do?

The most distinctive gesture in the series is material. Inspired by kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold, Bassin sews embroidery thread directly into the photographic prints. The stitches are small acts of intervention that resemble both repair and attention. They do not fix the damage. They do not conceal the trees' scars. Instead, they make the wounds more visible, drawing attention to what has been endured and to the care required to remain in relationship with a vulnerable life.

Bassin frames the method as symbolic rather than restorative. "They do not conceal the trees' scars or suggest that damage can simply be undone," she writes. The larger project examines injury, damage, loss, grief, resilience, and repair through personal and collective experience, and it connects the climate crisis to social justice and mental health. In short: the needle acknowledges harm instead of hiding it.

Who is Donna Bassin?

Bassin is a Brooklyn-born, New Jersey–based photographer, filmmaker, writer, and clinical psychologist. Her work draws on decades of experience as a trauma therapist. She trained in art therapy at Pratt Institute, later earned a PhD in clinical psychology, and pursued psychoanalytic training. Her early work as a handmade clay artist shaped a core conviction: trauma leaves marks on bodies, minds, and the materials we touch.

That conviction governs her process. Her photographs are burned, torn, sutured, and sometimes reinforced with gold tape, again in reference to kintsugi. These interventions do not conceal damage. They make loss visible, on the principle that repair begins with acknowledgment.

Collaboration and community sit at the center of her practice. She has worked with military veterans to transform their uniforms into handmade paper, culminating in the installation "By Our Own Hand" at the Montclair Art Museum. She conceived and directed two award-winning documentaries, "Leave No Soldier" and "The Mourning After."

Her exhibition record is substantial:

• Solo shows at the Montclair Art Museum ("The Afterlife of Dolls"), the Newport Art Museum ("Portraits of the Precarious Earth"), and the Morris Museum ("Interwoven: Rupture and Repair")
• Recent exhibitions with The Pictorial Foundation, Marymount Manhattan College's Hewitt Gallery, and Lenscratch
• Work held in public and private collections and exhibited internationally, including in Japan and Portugal

Her photographs, essays, and interviews have appeared on New Jersey PBS's State of the Arts, Rhode Island PBS's ART, Inc. episode "The Art of Repair," and in publications including The Pictorial List, Tricycle, Lenscratch, Analog Forever, and Overlapse's Stir the Pot.

Recognition has followed. Bassin received a 2024 Puffin Foundation Artist Grant and a 2021 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship, and Critical Mass named her a Top 50 Photographer and Finalist in each year from 2022 to 2024.

The Portraits of a Precarious Earth project continues, and the Karuizawa installation points to where it is heading: work that leaves the gallery wall and stands beside its living subjects, inviting viewers to weigh what centuries of endurance may yet lose.