Tree Teacher Tree by Anna Souter
For trees, the writings of philosophers mean nothing beyond the paper pulp on which they are printed. Words are of trees, but trees communicate with each other and with us in ways that go beyond human language. As Herman Hesse puts it, trees live to “fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves.” Trees are our teachers – but what are we able to learn from them?
Tree Teacher Tree is nestled within a dell carved by a small stream, set alongside the sort of public footpath popular with local dog walkers and early morning ramblers. Field maple, ash, beech, hazel, and holly mingle their stems and strew their leaves across the muddy ground. It might be called quiet, but it is loud with the movements of branches, the rillings of water, and the scurryings of small creatures.
Most visitors stumble upon the artworks on their way to another destination – or to no destination at all. Many probably pass by without consciously distinguishing art from woodland detritus. Some are drawn up short when they come face to face with the coils of a snake, apparently trapped within discarded polystyrene packaging. Polly Morgan’s sculpture Consider the Risk (2020), incorporating a colourful polyurethane cast of a large Burmese Python, marks the presence of an uncanny intervention in the woodland setting.
Tree Teacher Tree is an exhibition woven into a landscape. Across the dispersed works of four artists, the project creates its own rhythm in harmony and counterpoint with the surrounding ecosystem, alternately blending in and standing out like the warp and weft of a tapestry. Pieces are installed directly on the ground without plinths, creating an intimate material connection between artwork, forest floor and the physical space inhabited by the viewer.
Some works, such as Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press's Rear View Mirror (2020), are placed on the boles or branches of trees above the viewer’s eye line, waiting to be sought out or noticed when a flash of reflected light catches the corner of the eye. Lorry wing mirrors inscribed with short phrases are lashed to branches among the leaves, creating a subtle space for physical and metaphorical reflection. One mirror reads “bad review”. Depending on the angle, it might be seen to reflect the surrounding forest or the viewer; it is a cheeky intervention that also offers a quiet commentary on how human beings have treated the more-than-human world.
Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, Rear View Mirror, 2020
Nearby lies a flagstone engraved with a unique ISBN, Heavy Petal is registered by Banner as a publication at the British Library. Paving stones are designed to be a barrier between people and soil and between water and soil, to separate human feet from “dirty” ground. They are usually found in urban environments, but here Banner’s flagstone is set slightly away from the muddy path; here only badgers and foxes will walk on it, defying its nominal purpose. The work stands proud of the soil, its edges blurred by creeping groundcover plants in summer and fallen twigs in autumn, communicating hidden words to its surroundings.
Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, Heavy Petal, 2020
Emily Joy’s interventions are similarly subtle. Her Portals (2021) are pinned to tree trunks throughout the dell. At first glance they resemble the metal disks used by forestry workers to identify stands of trees, but on closer inspection they reveal tiny engraved landscapes, transporting the viewer into miniature worlds. The contours of the depicted valleys and mountains play off the crevices of the mossy bark, hinting at kaleidoscopic layers of ecosystems at every scale. Joy also plays with scale in her works using appropriated stones from the site. The weathered rocks are built up with black clay mountains and scattered across the forest floor, creating an archipelago of miniature mountainous islands, adrift in a sea of leaves.
Emily Joy, Portal, 2021
Emily Joy, Portal, 2021
Colin Glen’s The Clearing (2021) borrows the dimensions of a domestic place. The work delineates a space among the trees in crisp white timber, sculpturally carving out a locus for experiencing the forest anew. From within the ghostly walls, the canopy takes on the role of a roof, helping visitors to reimagine the woodland as a sanctuary and home for humans and nonhumans alike. The sculpture also resembles a ruin or an unfinished project, a three-dimensional structure offering an illusion of shelter.
Colin Glen, The Clearing, 2021
The cast snake in Polly Morgan’s Consider the Risk is wrapped around itself in an apparently infinite loop. Its iridescent skin is adorned with brown spots, its creamy yellow belly exposed and vulnerable on one side as it seems to be trapped in – or escaping from – the confines of a polystyrene packing case. The squeezed coils are visceral and shockingly realistic; instantly recognisable, the work speaks to both a primal human fear of snakes and an equally instinctive compassion for suffering animals. Consider the Risk should look entirely alien in its Gloucestershire woodland setting but, in the true sense of the uncanny, it looks simultaneously out-of-place and at home, a reminder of how we’ve become used to finding manmade objects and non-native species in every environment, no matter how remote or “natural”.
Polly Morgan, Consider the Risk, 2020
The dell that plays host to Tree Teacher Tree bears the marks of gentle human use. It is not a closed, pristine ecosystem, but an environment threaded through with the lives of people. The well-trodden footpath marks out a liminal zone, imbued with a sense of common ownership. Rural but not isolated, it is a setting for solace and solitude, but also for connection: secret trysts, teenaged experiments, or the sort of intimate conversations that can only be had when walking side by side.
Tree Teacher Tree is about these interconnections between people, nonhuman beings, and place. Writing in the early 20th century, Herman Hesse claims he most admires trees when they “stand alone,” because they remind him of “great, solitary men.” The reality, however, is that trees do not thrive when they stand alone. Most plants prefer to live in communities, both within and beyond species boundaries; a woodland, at its heart, is a collaboration.
In the forest, trees form symbiotic relationships with filamentous strands of fungi in the soil, extending the roots’ reach and increasing their access to nutrients and water. This mycorrhizal network also connects the trees to each other; electric signals pulse along the strands as indecipherable whispers travel below ground. Scientists have shown that trees use the so-called “wood wide web” to share nutrients; in winter months, photosynthesizing coniferous trees send carbon to their leafless deciduous neighbours, safe in the knowledge that they will receive extra carbon in return during the deciduous trees’ summer growth spurts. The trees are part of a cycle, seasonally working with fungi, insects, and birds to communicate and reproduce.
Suzanne Simard writes of “mother trees”; the oldest and largest trees in the forest, connected to more mycorrhizal strands than any other and closely connected to all their neighbours. Mother trees send information to their seedlings growing in the understory, where there is not enough light for them to grow well otherwise. The mother trees can tell which seedlings are their own kin (from the same species) and they nurture them by refraining from growing their roots in the seedlings’ growing space. They send extra carbon to the offspring of other trees as well, presumably to support the mutually beneficial interspecies relationships that are key to the forest’s success.
The artworks in this exhibition tread lightly on the earth, respectfully borrowing from the trees and engaging in a gentle push and pull with the landscape. Like the trees themselves, they are intermingled. Herman Hesse writes, “Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is.” And yet listening to the trees can remind us what we are: infinitely layered, intimately interconnected. In contrast to Herman Hesse’s masculine and individualistic approach to vegetal life, Tree Teacher Tree takes inspiration from the forest’s genderqueer interdependence: some trees, such as yew, are able to change gender in response to the needs of the community, brown cones giving way to succulent red berries or vice versa.
If we can move away from our tendency to see trees as static, individual symbols, we can reframe our understanding of the forest as a superorganism made up of collaborative, community-driven, living beings. By challenging how we see trees, we also challenge how we see ourselves. Learning from and living with trees helps us to recognise the limitations of our dominant binary ways of thinking. Instead, our tree-teachers might inspire us to adopt a more open-ended, fluid approach to gender, self, and community. The trees teach us how to live together.
