Peace Arbour

This year, Glasgow Women’s Library opens its new temporary orchard for people to acknowledge grief and imagine peaceful futures. At the orchard, artist Reiko Goto Collins has created a fruit tree nursery and a forum for discussion, learning, reflection, and imagination that centres the value of nature in neighbourhoods. Working with local communities, Reiko evokes the powerful capacity trees have to affect ourselves and our threatened environment. Similarly, at the heart of this garden Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree, 1996/2024, creates a focal point for people to express future wishes and needs. During Glasgow International the garden is activated by a series of performances and facilitated discussions by Reiko and the library team. 

These events are programmed in harmony with changing daylight conditions, from sunrise gatherings to conversations in the dusk – the differences in time and light reflecting Reiko’s interactions with trees. The orchard is a site for thoughts, ideas, dialogue, and performance, where artists and visitors can explore communicating beyond words and empathetic relations with trees as more than human others. Within this outdoor space of hope, artworks by Yoko addressing grief and peace preside over the nursery and inside the library, joining archival objects that demonstrate the endurance of earth peace practices. Yoko’s participation speaks to the library’s intention to honour the long trajectory of feminist artists, advocating Peace is Power.