Audio essay commissioned by the Hayward Gallery and produced in collaboration with Ed Prosser. You are invited to join this walk through the woods, looking at trees through a fly’s eyes and listening to whether a yellow leaf is louder than a green one.
This essay was originally delivered as a guided tour of Among the Trees, an exhibition of 38 artists exploring human relationships with trees and forests, on the 14 March 2020.
Mending and moving with tenderness through the wood, the essay buzzes around sculptures by Giuseppe Penone, Robert Smithson, Roxy Paine and Mariele Neudecker and poems by Vahni Capildeo, Emily Dickinson, Sasha Dugdale and Alice Oswald to explore harm and healing in sculpture, language and trees.
As part of the exhibition, the Hayward Gallery also commissioned and installed a pair of poems for the one-leaved ash growing on the Southbank Centre site. Read I. ash to ask the questions and II. questions to ask the ash here.
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Sasha Dugdale, ‘Ten Moons’ in Red House (Carcarnet, 2011)
Alice Oswald, ‘Tree Ghosts’ in Woods, etc. (Faber, 2005)
Albero Porta – Cedro/Door Tree – Cedar (2012).
Cedar, 316 x 105 x 105 cm. © Archivio Penone 2020.
Courtesy the artist, Gagosian, Rome and Marian Goodman Gallery, London.
Upside Down Tree I (1969), Alfred, New York, USA, 1969;
Upside Down Tree II (1969), Captiva Island, Florida, USA, 1969;
Upside Down Tree III (1969), Yaxchilan, Yucatán, Mexico, 1969.
Installation view of Among the Trees, Hayward Gallery. Courtesy Holt/Smithson Foundation. Photo: Mark Blower.
And Then the World Changed Colour: Breathing Yellow (2019). Installation view of Among the Trees, Hayward Gallery, 2020. Photo: Mark Blower.