Waters: a journey through Scots pine

This is a journey of waters in the Cairngorm forests (Scotland), making their way from recently harvested scots pine plantations, through the Rothiemurchus estate containing heather and bilberry peat bogs and 350-year-old Scots pines, into the valley of the Allt Druidh. It is a journey of an inverted perspective; the surrounding environments are not exterior to the waters and the waters are not exterior to the surrounding environments. They are all intimately interconnected. Neither are our human actions separated from the reality of the soils, vegetation or freshwater that passes through these landscapes.

The installation consisted of a 3 meter square tent, which contained a projector and screen and a pine tree stump with roots that had been wrenched out of the ground during the process of tree felling. The stump was placed partially in front of the screen, so the light from the film would illuminate the stump. The displayed roots come from the harvested scots pine plantation where they were found upside down, as they are displayed. The surrounding soil and rocks were removed from these roots, including the large boulder which was found held in the centre within the roots.

The installation was created for the “Evolving the Forest” three-day symposium at Dartington Hall in Devon, UK. It drew together a wide variety of voices to explore the heritage of woodland and forest. It also marked 100 years of modern forestry in the UK and looks forward to the next hundred, incorporating the annual conference of the Royal Forestry Society. The symposium brought together foresters, environmental managers, policy-makers, scientists and other experts; discussions were developed between artists and architects, writers, philosophers and others who wander and wonder in our varied British forests; and the idea was to learn from others around the world about their own cultural connections to trees, and the wood that produces some of the world’s most useful and most beautiful objects. Certainly the programme was very diverse and rather exciting.

The installation was created to question the destructive nature of modern intensive forestry in Scotland, where the peats soils are fragile and the streams are interconnected with the forest ecosystems.