Where once we stood on Scragged Oak Hill - rekindling an animistic worldview.
I’m always on the look out for forests or forest scenes that capture my attention. Sometimes I learn of a place, or see something on a map that looks promising and I plan a trip to check it out. Over the last few years there have been several times when I have arrived at the place I had hoped to take a photograph only to find it gone — logged, or thinned or, in some cases sanitised to prevent the spread of beetles that might threaten a tree species if it were to breed unchecked.
In the photograph above you can see a pile of sticks. These are the remains of felled fir trees in Glen Lyon, Scotland. The landscape was quite arresting; open moor where once there had been a thick forest, with the occasional tree still standing. All about were these tall piles of broken boughs, it was almost as if the remains of the trees had gathered themselves up and were trying stand once again. This vision stuck in my mind and slowly grew into a new project — Find areas of felled trees and construct some kind of stick figures made from the remains. And so I began my project ‘Where once we stood on Scragged Oak hill’. This title comes from the name of an area where I built the first figure - Scragged Oak Hill in Sussex where used to be an atmospheric grove of large Hemlock trees which were cut down — perhaps for timber — I’m not sure why.
Above left is ‘Remains of Hemlock’ standing on Scragged Oak Hill. Before the trees were felled, I used to visit with my 4 year old niece who enjoyed the forest den that was there. We once wrote her name on the ground using sticks – the idea stuck in my mind, and with the right catalyst, it gestated into this project.
Many iterations exist in my sketchbook, ten exist (or did) in reality. One of the benefits of this project is its economy – I am able to make sculptures with almost zero material cost save for the price of a ball of twine to help hold it all together. The woods become my outdoor studio and materials are free – one just picks them up off the ground. I try to make them as sturdy as possible, often drilling holes and pegging sticks together with a small carved dowel.
They are intended to be the subject of a photograph, not a piece of artwork in their own right. The photograph is the final artefact.
The photographic process is integral to the final artwork as each shot employs a very long exposure. A white scrim is moved behind the sculpture to create the illusion of a mist which performs the essential job of separating the figure from its background.
I am not against proper forest management in any way. This project is not an environmental protest. I believe the area in Glen Lyon was predominantly a plantation of Sitka spruce which, when planted in such numbers, can create a monoculture with little room for any other species. I imagine it may be replanted with more native Caledonian pine. Below ‘Green Man’ was made form spruce after an area was sanitised to prevent the spread of spruce bark beetle in the south of England.
Nevertheless, in the areas I often come across, the machinery used to fell trees leaves its scars in the woodland landscape. The woods where all my figures are built are local to me in Sussex, a place I have visited many times in the last twenty years. It is often startling to find an area cleared. It is necessarily violent I suppose; you need big machinery which churns up the ground. It leaves a mess, I cant help but feel a little shocked by the mechanistic intrusion into a peaceful wooded landscape.
This project is closer to an articulation of something I like to think of as ‘neo-animism’ - the idea that everything in nature has some kind of spirit, trees rocks and rivers included. The building of a symbolic ‘forest figure’ is more like a personal recognition and connection to the area of forest that has been sacrificed either for timber, fuel, thinning, habitat change or because it was diseased and needed to be sanitised. It acts as a symbolic witness to the drastic change that has occurred in the space.
Perhaps a rekindling of animistic ways of thinking would be beneficial in the fight to protect our environment. We protect we love, and the more connection we feel, the greater we will fight to protect it. The forest figures are my attempt to connect to the land, much as cultures have done for millennia, drawing or constructing symbolic figures that personify the unseen forces of nature, gods of wind, fertility, the forest, the sea. These are all ways to attempt some kind of dialogue with the mystery of our world and its hidden workings. The figures suggest the consciousness and intelligence of nature.
Once photographed, these figures are left in situ to slowly decay. Some still stand, others have fallen and disappeared entirely. I do not know if people have come across them, or indeed what they think if they do, but I enjoy the idea of mystery and wondering what they are and why they were built.
