Between the Trees, 2014. What is a forest? Is it the trees or the space that exists between them? ‘A forest is what exists between its trees, between its dense undergrowth and its clearings, between all its life cycles and their different time-scales…A forest is a meeting place between those who enter it and something unnameable and attendant… Something intangible and within touching distance. Neither silent nor audible.* These images explore the nature and meaning of ‘Forest’ by considering the experience of standing alone in the woods; the eerie and captivating sensation that time has slowed down and that the forest and everything within it exists in a different state. Somehow set apart from our usual perception of linear time the wind drops, the air cools, all is quiet and still and the forest draws in. To enter this other place is to accept a slowing of time and a shift in perception. The swirling, hanging and drifting smoke allows us to observe time moving at an almost imperceptible pace, and to focus on the interior space that is very much part of the forest, guiding the eye away from the trees and allowing it to linger on this ‘betweenness’. Suspended and still, the smoke fills the spaces between the trees reflecting this physical experience: the palpable and brooding cognisance of the forest, the muffled and flattened sound, the prickling sense of heightened awareness. The mist fills the gaps to draw us into the spaces between. * John Berger in - ‘Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance’, p.135-140 Verso, 2007.
I have worked in UK forests since 2007, making images which explores the complex interrelationship between the landscape and the individual. Our understanding of landscape can be seen as a construction in which layers of meaning that reflect our own cultural preoccupations and anxieties obscure the reality of the land, veiling it, and transforming the natural world into an idealization. These altered landscapes are a reflection of my personal relationship with the forest, a meditation on universal themes relating to the psyche and they explore the concept of landscape as a social and culture.
