After a slightly more eventful Christmas break than planned (family illness, injured dog etc.) during which I managed to do far less work than I wanted to I'm thrilled to be 'back to work' today. I did manage to finish 'Living Planet' by David Attenborough which delighted me, and have started 'The Story of Art Without Men' by Katy Hessel which is fascinating.
David Attenborough's book fascinated me not just because it's him and he's amazing, but I realised he was managing to tell the story of the planet in a number of different scales all at the same time. He goes right back to the beginnings of life, almost as far as the beginnings of the universe, and also talks about life today. He also focusses on huge regions whilst picking out the minutiae of a few individuals within a species. All within the space of a few sentences. I realised the construction of the book is very clever to enable him to do this for the book is not chronological but grouped by habitat type from pole to equator with the seas being covered separately. This got me thinking about the way I look at the forest and how I want to tackle my work about it. I have an idea for a large hanging piece, starting title 'Fragile Forest' where printed matter inspired by the forest creates a delicate hanging mini-forest for the viewer to walk amongst.
I got thinking about looking more closely at the textures and smaller 'views' in the forest, imagining it from an ant's eye view rather than a human one. David Attenborough also points out that there are no natural landscapes remaining in the UK, over millennia humans have altered so much that even the mountains have pine plantations and the forests are managed so that nothing 'natural' remains, we have altered every bit of it by forcibly removing natural vegetation or animal species or introducing new plants and animals so that the landscape was altered by the change. There is no part of Britain's landscape unaffected by the acts of humans over time. This got me thinking about all the different stakeholders of the Swinley Forest and how they affect the way it looks. I'd like to research both the human and non-human stakeholders and find out what effect their presence has on the forest and create pieces to record this. I'd then have separate works which could somehow be pieced together to create a representation of the forest as a whole.
Today when I walked in the forest I started taking pictures of things I'd not considered before, tyre tracks and freshly logged trees and the marks on them. I also found an amazing bit of very old iron fence, likely to be from a historic boundary of the Bagshot Park Estate (Home to the Earl and Countess of Wessex) which had altered a tree which had embedded the fence in it's trunk. I think finding out more about the history of the forest and recording finds like this could be really interesting.
