exhibited as part of `Watershed’ at blackShed gallery 2025
So far, my work with woodland has focused mainly on Bexhill Highwoods, the remnants of an ancient, worked, English woodland, where I have considered the importance of water and the watershed to the flora and fauna. I have observed patterns of species defined by the level of available water, such as alder carrs, an area of waterlogged woodland populated by alder. Alder, according to folk law, likes to have its feet in the water and was used to make fine charcoal for high-grade gunpowder. I have carried buckets of water to gain a physical sense of how much water a tree moves skyward to photosynthesise, converting energy into mass. A mature oak tree can move up to 100 gallons a day in the growing season. Carrying that quantity in buckets the same distance along the ground is solid work; imagine lifting it 20 to 40 metres into the air, the height of a mature English oak (Quercus Robur).
Walking the woods next to the Blackshed gallery, thinking specifically about the global water cycle, created a shift in perspective. I walked through the woodland, considering it as part of the watershed, the water cycle, and the global climate. Pushing the focus out from the individual tree to the woodland, to the woodland coverage of the nation, and the influence of woodland worldwide.
In 2020, a tree survey of Bexhill estimated it contained 228,000 trees, including those in the Highwoods. As a thought experiment, consider half of the potential 100 gallons a day pushed into the sky by a mature oak: 50 * 228,000 = 11million 400 thousand gallons of water per day, just over 17 Olympic-sized swimming pools a day. Water that cools the air and re-enters the cycle early, returning to streams, rivers and reservoirs, the flora and fauna of the island. All of that water is part of a system that creates and maintains a climate conducive to human life.
The UK used to have temperate rainforests on its west side; pre-settlement, it had around 60% tree coverage; currently, it’s around 13% with only a tiny fraction of this being ancient, semi-natural woodland. A step at a time, through the squelch of the spring mud, the cool air and dry earth of the summer, a sense of the pattern in which woodland plays a significant critical role in our climate expanded and took shape. Not a pattern in maths, physics and geophysics – although the science is useful and relevant, but a pattern expressed as an interdependent web of life in which water represents a flow that maintains the system. Climate change is a water crisis, and trees locally, nationally and globally are a critical element in managing the crisis, yet we continue to treat them as a disposable resource or worse, an impediment to the economic productivity landscape. A 2007 scientific paper proposed a theory called the Biotic pump, suggesting large forests actively create winds that transport water from the oceans inland, driving continental rainfall and maintaining the water cycle. Forests are active participants in making the rain that supports them and us.
In response to this additional and expanding perspective in my exploration of our relationship with woodland, I am working on a set of images which I call “Looking Up at Trees”. The working concept is that the image provides a focal point, encouraging consideration of the complex and interdependent role of trees in the global biosphere. The act of looking up at trees places the sky, the thin, fragile gaseous layer in which we live, firmly in frame, tree branches, like fingers, reaching into it. Images created as clearly layered constructions speak of the complexity of multiple perspectives. The current working development of this image series focuses on individual trees, with the sky circular and centre forming a suggestion of an umbilical cord connecting it to the growing living biosphere.