A copy of The Observer’s Book of Trees (1937, revised 1960) emerged from a recent clear-out of my grandparents’ home, and struck me as a poignant evocation of a generational difference in thinking. In it, nature appears categorizable and knowable. It is interpreted authoritatively within human structures. The Oak is ‘the patriarch of the forest’, the Ash ‘the Venus of the Woods’. In our current era of mass extinction and ecological crisis, we mourn the replacement of familiarity with nature by alienation, often linked to urbanization and digitization. But the book also presents an attitude of mastery over nature which is a major contributor to the problem. 

 

This project seeks to examine our relationship to a generation whose conviction left a complex legacy, in terms of ecology, patriarchy and colonialism amongst other things, but who are also much loved and nurturing family members. Through this project I seek to celebrate them, mourn their passing, examine their legacy, and look to a future without them. 

 

There are different interwoven projects within this exhibition. 

 

The bones are painted from a human skeleton which my grandmother bought (when that was legal) for medical reference. Images of bones obviously evoke death, but their forms are determined by their function to support life. I tried to keep this tension in mind when painting them. 

 

The moths were painted when I was very depressed. I had struggled to get out of bed for hours, and finally managed to haul my body upright and downstairs to my desk where I found a dead moth that my mother had put there because she knows me well and thought I might want to paint it. I painted it 20 times. Barely there, fragile, inert, like I felt. 

 

The paintings of me as a baby, with my parents, of my mother in the bath, and of my grandmother with a paramedic came out of a wish to delve into the intimate knowledge that family members have of each other’s bodies. There are also a couple of paintings which are an attempt to comprehend the collision of those intimate family relationships with wider political power structures. The found objects extend this investigation. 

 

The exhibition was initially conceived for the funeral chapel in Brompton Cemetery, a setting constructed for and by nature and mourning. Then, appropriately for a show partially about loss, it was cancelled. I began to conceive an online exhibition, and to organise collaborations. 

 

The digital space has afforded many opportunities as well as restrictions, which Katrina Man the curator has written more about in her catalogue essay. 

 

It allowed me to conceive the digital space as forest. That is to say, as space where exploration and spatial story telling can happen, as well as disorientation and queering of preconceptions. Being forced into working in the digital sphere allowed me to interrogate my own prejudice about it as the opposite of ‘the natural world’, whatever that is. We know now that trees are not individuals, but part of interrelated systems, incorporating mycorrhizal fungi, other plants and animals in communicative, symbiotic woodland networks. Like trees, humans are not individuals, as the capitalist lie would have us believe, but permeable entities within overlapping networks, which are neither natural, nor human because they are both. 

 

This thought process was crystalized by working on the digital show, and made me realize that my initial grouping of urbanization and digitization with alienation was false, and that the digital and the urban can be pathways to decreasing alienation from nature.