Norweigan Spruce Detail - Edwina FitzPatrick
Could Art that follows a more scientific or empirical approach be a direct way of reaching a wider audience with the evidence it gleans from its investigative approach?
The Archive of the Trees took place in Fineshade Wood in Northamptonshire between January and December 2018. It was commissioned by Fermynwoods Contemporary Art.
Artist Edwina fitzPatrick invited Swansea University’s UK Oak Project team to collect and analyse very small cores from healthy mature trees in Fineshade Wood .The cores reveal the tree’s age, growing patterns, past weather conditions and stresses such as diseases. In effect, they are the tree’s own archive: each specimen reveals its ‘autobiography’.
The poet W.H. Auden wrote, ‘A culture is no better than its woods’.
How far away are you from something made of wood as you read this? Trees are processed in so many ways that they’re easily overlooked. When does a tree become timber? When does that timber become a table or the paper pulp forming a book?
My Archive of the Trees project was commissioned by Fermynwoods Contemporary Art and took place at Fineshade Wood in Northamptonshire in 2018. Managed by Forestry England, it is part ancient woodland (trees over 500 years old), part tree farm. The images on #irreplaceable are of magnified trees cores that I invited Swansea University’s Geography Department (UK Oak Project) to collect and analyse from Fineshade’s healthy mature trees – the samples didn't harm the trees.
These dendrochronology cores reveal the tree’s age, growing patterns, past weather conditions and stresses such as diseases. In effect, they are the tree’s own archive: each specimen revealing its specific history – even trees of the same species growing a few hundred metres apart look very different from each other.
These tree core images are provocations, asking you to consider what an archive might be if a forest were to document itself. A reminder that woodlands are unique, resilient and highly accurate recorders of a changing climate, and that we should value them for their contribution to our culture.
Edwina fitzPatrick
Instagram: nikandedwina