On Tuesday I made my way to Shotover to work on a piece I’ve been thinking about for quite some time. The piece, about absent-presence, will, eventually, comprise videos of shadows in a wood, a few stills from which can be seen below.

But why woods?

Woods

Since I was a child, the image of the forest or wood has been an important one. From when I was 7 or 8, the past seemed like another place – a ‘foreign county’ – rather than another ‘dimension’ of the place in which I lived, and that place, when imagined, was always thickly forested. I’m not sure why exactly, but I can remember being enthralled by the oft quoted ‘fact’ that in the past, a squirrel could travel the length of England without touching the ground. (See: Postcard from Corfe Castle 1978)

As an older child in the 1980s, when the tension of the cold war was still a part of everyday life, the thickly wooded past became a place of retreat, a world to which I could escape the threat of nuclear war. It was also around this time I started reading role-playing books (like Fighting Fantasy) whilst developing an interest in magic and adventure (if not quite Dungeons and Dragons). I began to create maps of imagined lands which, again, were often thickly wooded. These too were places to which I could escape and were in many ways a conflation of the past and my imagination. (See: Maps for Escaping)

Of course, as I became an adult, my imagined landscape changed. The past was no longer a place, in parts indistinguishable from worlds of monsters and magic, but indeed a different dimension of the place in which I lived. And yet, despite this difference, the symbol of the forest/wood remained a backdrop to my work (See: A Backdrop to Eternity). To imagine the past was, for me, to imagine a wood, vast and untouched, and in some respects, it would be true to say that my interest in the Environment developed as much as a means of preserving and accessing the past as safeguarding the future. The fact that many of these forests have vanished or been so depleted means their absence in the present – a stark difference between now and then – has become a metaphor for absence itself.

Even when I have sought to connect with those in the past, who lived through the most horrific events, the image of the wood returns as a means of reaching out to them.

A quote to which I’ve often referred from Paul Fussell:

…if the opposite of war is peace, the opposite of experiencing moments of war is proposing moments of pastoral.

(See: Proposing Moments of Patsoral

I discovered this quote whilst making work about World War I and it tied in with what I had been thinking, how it was impossible (and indeed unethical) to make work about these events directly (i.e. as though one were there), but possible to make work about the difference between now and then – about the attempt to empathise with people in the past, especially those who have lived through such traumatic events.

(See: Somewhere Between Writing and Trees)

The Woods, Breathing

This brings me onto Adam Czerniakow, another figure I have discussed extensively in relation to my work. (See: The Woods, Breathing)

As I wrote in that blog: For almost three years, Adam Czerniakow was ‘mayor’ of the Warsaw Ghetto. One of the inspirations for this work is a line taken from his diary, which he kept whilst living in Warsaw in occupied Poland from 1939 to his death in 1942. On September 14th 1941 he wrote:

In Otwock. The air, the woods, breathing.

On occasion, Czerniakow was allowed to leave the ghetto to visit the Jewish Sanatorium at Otwock just outside Warsaw. It was one place he could find some respite from the horror and torment he endured in the ghetto.

For Czerniakow, the woods were a place in which he could escape the horrors of life under Nazi occupation. He would also seek escape in books, and one night, on January 19th 1940, he  wrote in his dairy:

…During the night I read a novel, ‘Pilgrims of the Wild’ – Grey Owl… The forest, little wild animals – a veritable Eden.

Paul Fussell’s quote is worth repeating here:

…if the opposite of war is peace, the opposite of experiencing moments of war is proposing moments of pastoral.

This brings me back to what I wrote earlier, how it’s impossible for me to make work about the experience of war.

What I can do however is allude to war through its opposite – to borrow from Fussell – in “proposing of moments of pastoral”. This opposition between war and pastoral is there in the line about Otwock. It’s there too in Czerniakow’s reading of Grey Owl’s book set in the wilds of Canada. The question is, how can proposing moments of pastoral, enable us to bridge the divide between now and then, between those who suffered the horrors of Wold War I and the Holocaust and those of us who read about them?

In many respects, we can empathise with them not as victims but as people who lived lives before the war or whatever trauma they were faced with.

Shadow Writing

Before I get onto the ‘shadow paintings’ I made at Shotover, I want to remind myself about a blog I wrote on Chinese painting (See: Chinese Landscape Painting)

It contains a quote I have come back to time and time again from Christopher Tilley:

The painter sees the trees and the trees see the painter, not because the trees have eyes, but because the trees affect, move the painter, become part of the painting that would be impossible without their presence. In this sense the trees have agency and are not merely passive objects… The trees ‘see’ the painter in a manner comparable to how a mirror ‘sees’ the painter: that is, the trees like the mirror, let him become visible: they define a point of view on him which renders for him something that would otherwise remain invisible – his outside, his physiognomy, his carnal presence… the trees and mirror function as other.

And my final paragraph discussing the work of Yu Jian:

Like the trees, the mountains [Yu Jian painted] share that agency; they too ‘see’ the painter’ and it’s almost as if the painting becomes a painting, not of Yu Jian looking at the mountains, but of the mountain ‘seeing’ Yu Jian. It’s not the mountain that is made visible on the paper, but the artist’s outside, his physiognomy, his carnal presence.

I wanted these paintings to be images, not of shadows per se, but of a moment in time. They are as much about the rapidly painted strokes delineating that moment as the shadows they are tracing. I also like the way they resemble Chinese or Japanese calligraphy and could almost be a language whose meaning is lost; the language of a moment that has been lost.