Tree Teacher Tree (extended to 17th Dec, 2021)

Tree Teacher Tree

May 14 – 17 December 2021 

location: using App @what3words stuff.poet.rapid

Tree Teacher Tree resides along a public footpath in a secluded hollow, a stream runs close by, the works nestle on the dell floor or amongst the trees, such as Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press’s Rear View Mirror 2020, a reference to what kind of review nature might give mankind. Banner has also placed a flagstone with its own ISBN, it is an official publication in and of itself. Flagstones are usually associated with the city to keep the earth and roots below and things smooth, even and mudless on top, here the woodland floor can grow and envelop the hand engraved stone. Is it a tomb or a tome, or a story about concrete or footsteps or roots or routes taken?

Emily Joy has worked within the dell; repositioning, altering or obscuring found rocks. Exploring cultural ideas of land and landscape, wilderness, nostalgia and loss, ‘Portals’ 2021 is a series of works in which erasure isolates elements of the landscape, a process akin to whittling down or erosion. Scale and contours change; a scene of mountain grandeur is focused to the intimate scale of a stone, a forest sharpened down to a mossy tump.

Colin Glen’s ‘The Clearing’ 2021, is the partial recreation of an intimate domestic space, whose dimensions are drawn out in whitened timber, it is the ghost memory of projected experience. Its framework delineating an absence that stimulates a relationship with the presence of the natural world. The physical shift of imposing a built structure, combined with the visual sense of removal (no walls or ceiling), engenders the sense of being in place, combined with an awareness of how intertwined real and imagined experience is.

‘Consider the Risk’ 2020 by Polly Morgan deals with issues of containment, control and concealment. The corset like concrete and cast polystyrene structure struggles to contain a snake that contorts and spills from the openings, alluding to the distorting effect that social media has on our physical selves, especially of late, confined to our homes, communicating via binary code, shaping our restricted lives.

In a year where we have been forced to retreat to our homes, nature has become more present in our psyche and been of such solace. These four artists are guests of the wood for only a few months; Tree Teacher Tree is an acknowledgement of the natural world around us. This show is organised by artist Rachel Howard. Tree Teacher Tree is accessible via public footpath.

About the Artists

Self-taught with no formal education in art, Polly Morgan works in taxidermy, concrete and polyurethane. She is interested in creating deceptions, with sculptural facsimiles made from painted casts and skin, as a way of exploring false narratives in our increasingly polarised and digitised society. She lives and works in London.

Colin Glen’s practice is interested in the play of the imagination inherent in the move from the study of an object to its translation as visual representation. Finding, collecting and annotating mainly abandoned wire detritus in a kind of compulsive hoarding or guarding manner, which echoes acquisitive neurotic behaviour, then exalting such ephemera through drawn and painted studies. He is from and lives in central Stroud.

Emily Joy is a sculptor and installation artist. Underpinning her practice is an investigation into the subjectivity and loss inherent in remembering and reimagining; asking how experience is mediated by the imperfect copies of memory/language/image. The use of base materials and everyday objects is a common theme in Emily’s practice. She lives and works in Stroud.

Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press explores gender, collections, and publishing through a practice spanning as varied as drawing, sculpture, performance, and moving image. In 1997 she started her own publishing imprint The Vanity Press, which has been the backbone of her work ever since. The constant power struggle between words and their meaning is central to Banner’s conceptual approach that examines conflict, language, and its limitations. She lives and works in London.

Tree Teacher Tree is organised by British artist Rachel Howard and Doris Press, she lives and works in London and Gloucestershire. 

How to get there: trains to Stroud or Gloucester, 63 bus to St John the Baptist Church, Edge, GL6 6PG then walk to 51°47'38.2"N 2°12'41.5”W.                

Contact dorispress3@gmail.com for more information.