Multi-media installations
Undercurrents. A multi-media installation celebrating the River Allen, Dorset, presented at Walford Mill, Wimborne, during September 2021.
Sacred groves. In many cultures, sacred forests or groves of trees are places of transformation. As Albertina Nugteren said: “In many sacred geographies, the botanical continues to connect the present with the past, the material with the symbolic, and the contemporary ecological with the traditionally sacred”. These installations represent an attempt to create sacred groves for the 21st century, made from the rejectamenta of modern society, to encourage a transformation of our way of life. Each of these was a collaborative project with maker, Lynn Davy.
Other recent projects exploring our relationship with trees include All Trees are Clocks and Heartwood 2014 / 2017.
Two additional explorations of creating sacred groves through use of sound were developed at the Dartington International Summer School in 2017: ‘Taxus timeline‘ and ‘I was sitting under a tree‘. In the first of these, a multi-speaker array was hidden within a hedge of yew (Taxus baccata) and used to disseminate a soundscape characteristic of the location. The second piece took as its starting point the famous composition by Alvin Lucier, ‘I was sitting in a room‘. This involves recording a person saying ‘I was sitting in a room’, then playing back the sound and repeatedly re-recording it, until all is left is the resonant sound of the space. This was adapted to explore the resonant characteristics of the ancient yew that grows in the churchyard at Dartington Hall.
