Brisées takes as its raw material the vast, unruly image supply of the internet. Helen Sear began with a Google image search for the phrase “tree surgeon,” then worked from the resulting photographs of woodlands, pruning, and climbing. The pictures in the book are monochrome and often visibly pixelated, their degraded surfaces retained rather than corrected. Across them Sear places a single orb, sometimes large enough to cover half the picture surface.

The orbs read as arbitrary at first, but they are deliberately sited: balanced within stripped tree crowns, positioned with care. Ropes and ladders remain visible inside some of the spheres, traces that point back to the labour and the obscured figure the search terms first called up. The project grew out of a more local act, Sear’s gathering of branches and twigs from Cuckoo Wood near her home in Wales. Her title acknowledges Michel Leiris’s 1966 work of the same name.

The book includes an essay by Jonathan P. Watts. Sear is the artist behind the photographic artwork; the internet-sourced tree-surgeon images she works from are not individually attributed in the available catalogue credits, and the original photographers are not identified. The result sits between photographic work and an examination of how images circulate and lose their makers.

The 64-page hardback is silkscreened and foil stamped on cloth, published by GOST Books in 2013. The book’s interest lies in its visual argument and in the tension between the roughness of the imagery and the deliberation of its making.