TREES

 I have been reading these Tree Books. I gave them all to my cousin Bill in West Wood last night. The first I bought from the Alnwick Book shop on the way to Edinburgh and it is a good authentic book, it feels like one very decent man's failure to curate and own a wood and also a really beautifully written description of two trees. The Ash and The Beech was written by Richard Mabey in the 1990s and is about the failure of his attempt to buy a wood and make it authentic.  The second book I ordered from the Hebden Bridge Bookshop and it is by a famous person, John Driori, who lives close by and who I am supposed to be meeting in Cerne Abbas in the next few days. It is very beautiful and has lovely illustrations. It is called Around the world in 80 trees.  The third book I also bought from the Hebden Bridge bookshop on my friend Lois' instructions and I started it, and it made me feel nervous. It is called Feral and it is about how he spears fish and carries home wild deer...

  When I was at Jessops cottage last week I was going to take some pictures of trees.  I took my proper camera equipment and imagined walking in the early morning and doing long exposures of single trees, their leaves would blur by their gentle movement as they blow in the wind.  I tried this arty farty based approach when I first started the work with Abi in Rotherham. Long exposures to try and capture the movement of kids, I ended up getting some interesting pictures that the parents didn't like as they thought they were crap and out of focus. There are two reasons why I couldn't actually get out and take some images.  The first was having the confidence that the images I took would be anything more than banal and the second that going out as a singular subjective individual and taking some images that were trying to be something different to everyone elses images is exactly what you would expect an artist to do, especially and artist who thinks he can't draw....

I have been thinking about the language of trees.    I am thinking about what we mean when we think about trees and multilingualism.  I have been reading Khawla's book on "Language in a Globalised World" and "How Forests Think" as well as "Matter and Desire" and 'The Heartbeat of Trees'. There is a bit of tree-hugging in this, as well as some quite clever anthropology. Spot the tree-hugger. Khawla Badwan: moving to idea of ‘Languaging’ which has no boundaries: open, dynamic, overlapping, creative responsive, proactive, human, post-human and always in the making. (2021:7)   Weber (2014) Language is wild like a landscape (p.99).   Kohn (2013)  Also, goal is to defamiliarize the conventional sign by revealing how it is just one of several semiotic modalities and then to explore the very different non symbolic properties of those other semiotic forms that are usually occluded by and collapsed into the symbolic in anthropological analysis. (p.15)   ...

 I woke up today and thought about Ruskin.  In his book The Elements of Drawing one of his initial tasks is to lay under a tree and draw the spaces between the the branches, specifically to draw the empty space that constructs the form through marking its edges.  Perhaps this is one of our tasks within the trees project.  Instead of trying to draw the trees roots and branches we try and map the spaces between things. This will leave us with an idea of something that goes beyond initial preconceptions.  perhaps this is the point of both drawing and research. On radio four this morning a scientist was saying we should not really be planting trees we should be re-wilding; letting nature do its job.  He said that given time the planet would naturally grow back its forests and the thing we should do is step back and stop interfering. I am not sure how mainstream this science is but having seen how nature takes back land, the old world war 2 aircraft runways fo...

 I tried to follow Kate's example and think through what it means to be artist in residence on a project like this.  On reflection I am not at that point yet. I am holding the project at arms length in my mind. It is the next thing to be getting on with, not the thing to be getting on with. Its nice to be blogging again together it is a space I have missed. In the final analysis at least you know one other person will read this writing carefully.  Also it lays testament to a history of thinking, something to return too. I am worried about the tree project in that we have the massive problems facing the world, we have science, and we have the symbolic meaning of trees, the inherent poetics of them.  In one world an artist could just go with the poetics, of bark of sap and heart wood but that would not fit our treescapes project we are working with root and branch. At the moment I feel most interested in dead trees Paul Nash's photographs summoning up the killing fiel...

 Liz de Freitas asked me yesterday what I did as PI on this project and I wrote this:  It was interesting to be asked what I will do as a PI – I guess the answer is both everything and nothing.  Part of the job of a PI, in my view, is to be a holding space for all the thinking and doing in the project.  This means reading, thinking and listening. Then there is the co-production element, which is about planning and not planning at the same time. It is a kind of dance between failure and success, and it is a complex experience. Anyway, here it is. At the moment I am trying to make everything work. It is a bit like den-building. When I was a child my holidays were spent on the farm in Dorset. The moment we arrived I would disappear into the trees with my friend Anna and we would make dens for two weeks in the woods.  Trying to bring together such a range of twigs into one place that holds everyone together is, I think the work of building a den.  Here are some...