Where once we stood on Scragged Oak Hill

We walked through an area of recently felled trees. Tall piles of broken branches punctuated the newly exposed landscape; it was as if their remains were trying to gather themselves together and stand once more.

Where once we stood on Scragged Oak Hill is a project using the remnants of felled trees to build ‘forest figures.’ These talismanic forms act as a symbolic embodiment of the trees that have now gone – an arboreal haunting.

The Forest Figures draw, albeit indirectly, on older symbolic traditions—specifically animistic belief systems and European folk representations of nature. Figures such as the Green Man or the Woodwose embodied a personified, often unruly natural world—beings that blurred the boundary between human and landscape. While not literal depictions of these mythic forms, the Forest Figures can be understood as a contemporary reimagining of that impulse: to give shape to nature as an active, sentient force — they act as a witness to their surroundings.

The project’s title refers to the location of the first figure — Scragged Oak Hill — where a grove of mature hemlock trees once stood and were subsequently felled. Forest figure #1 (Remains of Hemlock) is made from their branches.