Tree Scribes, 2020 (ongoing)
The pace of life slowed down, with periods of isolation, I was grounded and connecting more with my immediate surroundings. These cyanotypes have been made in trees, trees that I see from the studio window. The view is of a ‘pleasure garden’, established in the early 1800’s it includes specimen trees, some as was the fancy, were from far away places. Whilst spending time outside making cyanotypes and working in the darkroom I was listening to an audiobook of ‘The Overstory’, dipping in and out of layered narratives describing various characters, their personal observations and relationships with trees, through which we are alerted to the purity and perils of the environment.
“The evergreen tips sketch and scribble on the morning sky.” from ‘The Overstory’ by Richard Powers.
These cyanotypes are part of a larger body of works described as ‘shadow drawings’. During a residency in Nicosia away from the darkroom, I began making cyanotypes on location, then in olive trees these were activated by the constancy and abundance of sunlight. The act of working outside was performative, it marks a significant shift in my practice. In his book, Powers describes the concept that trees “record in their own bodies the history of every crisis they have lived through” this seemed to speak for those olive trees in Nicosia that had witnessed conflict and exist in a contested space.
Expanding ‘shadow drawings’ to include trees from the pleasure garden; the Cedar Deodar the Lime and the Holm Oak was the beginning of working more extensively with trees, by comparison I can see the poetics of specific trees, as it has ‘scribed’ itself, into the surface of the cyanotype, by the actions of atmosphere and place. The tree speaks for itself.
The exposure times of these cyanotypes are approximately nine minutes, the recording in the tree is dependant not only on the intensity of sunlight but the strength of the wind, too much wind and the cyanotype will erase its own image resulting in pure blue.