Chalk Streams, 2023

I have been working in UK forests since 2007, making work which explores the complex interrelationship between the landscape and the individual. Our understanding of landscape can be seen as a construction in which layers of meaning that reflect our own cultural preoccupations and anxieties obscure the reality of the land, veiling it, and transforming the natural world into an idealisation. Between 2010 and 2018 I explored my relationship with woodlands and more widely, how we form our understanding of landscape in a social context. Ideas about forests are an entangling of nature and culture. Forests appear in folklore, fairy tales and myths as places of enchantment and magic, danger and mystery, sanctuary and regeneration, and in turn these cultural preoccupations and anxieties colour the way we perceive the natural world. During this period I used the forest as a studio, creating sculptural interventions within woodland spaces and choosing locations that mirrored or contrasted the subject within its setting. I used found materials or created pools of light on the forest floor, intertwined smoke between branches, introduced small fires or starscapes taken by the Hubble Teles