A project based in the forest as an otherworldly place of ritual, myth, transformation; and also of birth, intimacy, rest, and nurture. A space we have become removed from, which exist in pockets of our human-populated land, but from which we recognise both a sense of familiarity and of awe. The druids believed trees to be gods and worshipped them. The deep networks of roots, mycelium, branches, hollows, and shelters remind us of something holy and bodily. The forest as a point of reaching in balance toward to sky and deep into the earth. The forest is a reminder of our interconnected-ness, and our not yet lost longing to belong to this nurturing and treacherous cycle of nature from which we came. Creating work to be installed in these spaces attempts to decentralise an entirely human experience of artwork, there is an intention to weave human-made creations into nature-made ones.
Web-weaving: connections between things, symbolic place of creation (the spider who weaved the world) and of death, to be swaddled and consumed
Initial web design, between found branches, attaching a mixture of natural objects and personal (and impersonal) scraps, trinkets, found objects
I remade this on a larger scale as a forest installation, December 2024
Installation of the web at Future Roots, Stanmer Park, in April 2025: Participants were invited to contribute found objects and writings/mark-makings with the directive to contribute to the stories woven together
The act of nest making: something dead and discarded becomes the carrier of birth and nurturer of life
Wings/flight; reaching high above, to grasp hold of something? to feel it leave between your fingers? Bowing low, sinking deeper, curling up into the palm of a bigger hand:
Body openings, hollows; where what is interior and exterior becomes one and boundaries between things dissolve
Rewilding the body/Queer ecology
Charcoal Drawing on plywood, Forest Installation
Offerings to the forest and the beings within it, attempts to connect:
Setting up my ceramic sculpture of open palms, filling it with seeds, positioning my trail-cam to capture visitors
Sculptures to connect to the land, to become one with the forest
This series are beased on longings of my own body: to emerge from, crawl inside, to feed, be fed, be opened up, wrap around, bow down to, melt into, reach down into soil and up toward leaves reaching up to then sun , happening October 2025
Unfired clay sculptures in fallen tree hollows
Wax harpy sculpture on branch
Bowing figure with string of bird and sycamore seeds
Sculptures to feed the birds, clay sculptures and seeds
Clay experiements
Opened silt body by the pond
Kneeling, opening sculpture with animal trail cam interactions
What is the meaning of the Forest?
Of branches that touch the sky and the soil at once
Of mouths that suckle
Teeth that bare themselves to someone
Stomachs that claw at tender insides in hunger
Then turn over themselves
And spit out something soft and curled up tightly
That something that was nestled in a corner of the body
Or of the rotting fallen oak
And had tumbled out when the time was right
When it’s fawn bowed legs might be able
To hold it up enough to reach up
For those same branches
And I press my skin hard against the soil
Like pulling myself into a lover’s body
Tighter, Closer
Until the difference between my heartbeat and theirs
My breath and theirs
The heat exchanged between our flesh
Becomes meaningless
I press my body into the earth
Into these paperthin layers of life itself
And whisper
I’m yours
I’m yours
I’m yours
I created a clay curled up figure and explored places in the forest they might rest in, be held in, be born from
I returned to a kneeling figure in unfired clay to see shoots from seeds offered in it had taken root in the remains of the body of the figure and had grown fresh green shoots
Ruby. C. 