Organic
Impressions:
Unearthing
the
Chthonic
Organic Impressions approaches the “hidden world” of the oak tree underground, using soil and roots as both the subject and material for photographs, to understand how trees construct their own world unrelated to human activity. The project’s origin began with the development of six Chthonotypes (kuh-thon-oh-types; a word derived from khthon, the Greek for soil and underworld, and týpos, the Greek for imprint), a series of photographs made with soil extracted from the roots of the Queen Elizabeth I Oak. Before the incorporation of tannin in my project Arboreal Encounters I became concerned that the fences which surrounded the trees of my study maintained a form of distance that I had originally sought to challenge.
To question this, I attended a workshop by the camera less photographic artist, Hannah Fletcher, that taught attendees how to incorporate soil into photographic images via chromatographs — a process combining the scientific process of separating out components in a mixture, typically with inks and dyes, together with photosensitive solution. As the chemical and physical structure of soil is a result of both the independent tree and its collective community, the prints that emerged act as a kind of fingerprint of the tree and its environment, as well as being representative of its chemical make-up and soil type.
However, what first began as a method to achieve a sense of symbolic proximity to the heritage trees, ended up becoming an investigation of the tree’s life underground. As Arboreal Encounters came to focus largely on how oak trees exist within human culture, how might I depict a more plant-oriented perspective of the oak’s life? From this question I then developed six Rhizotypes (ri-zoh-types; a word derived from rhíza, the Greek for root, and typos, the Greek for imprint), a series of oval cyanotypes made with soil debris and dead roots cut from the trunk of a six-year-old oak sapling. The sapling itself features as a component of the exhibition practice, allowing the audience to encounter a living embodiment of the project’s subject, almost as a piece of living sculpture. The sapling also appears as the subject of Stages of unearthing an oak tree, a triptych detailing the gradual reveal of the oak’s root system, and To suspend a root system, an 8 x 11 cm cyanotype that displays the roots of the oak, printed on handmade silk paper.
Untitled, Chthonotypes I-VI, Queen Elizabeth I Oak. Soil collected from the landscape of Queen Elizabeth I Oak, mixed with silver nitrate and exposed on A5 watercolour paper, from the project ‘Organic Impressions’, 2021.
“Regardless of either my own or Fletcher’s process, it is interesting to think of the resulting Chthonotypes functioning as if a metamorphosis of soil to bark. As the resulting prints detail, in part, an inscription of the soil’s physical movement from one environment to another (from the earth to the print), they also visualise the transformation of material from one part of the tree to another. Put plainly, the combination of soil, water and bark could be said to relate to the trunk’s ability to draw up water from the soil through its vascular system using their roots below ground. As the Chthonotypes begin with soil and result in images that resemble bark it could be said that they impress this organic method within the creative process and visual outcome; using water and silver nitrate to effectively shift a soil solution into a bark composition. Expanding on this idea, such images that contain and are made with part of the tree’s organic material, and that also visually represent an element of the tree’s form, exemplifies a type of plant/human, phyto/photo hybridisation that positions photographic practice as a malleable, porous medium. Furthermore, as the chemical and physical structure of soil is a result of both the independent tree and its collective community, the prints that emerge act as a kind of fingerprint of the specific tree and its specific environment, as well as being representative of its chemical make-up and soil type. As the prints in Arboreal Encounters are examples of the tree’s individuality, the Chthonotypes express this chemically through their unique soil composition. ”
— Epha J. Roe, notes on Organic Impressions, ‘These Rooted Bodies’, 2024.
In mid-2022, while organising an exhibition in Brighton, I re-potted an oak sapling into a glass bowl for it to become part of the display. As part of the process I decided to unearth the oak’s roots and see what would happen if I began to document it. To do so I set up a make-shift outdoor studio and made several images of the oak sapling in different stages. The three images that result from this were subsequently titled ‘Stages of Unearthing an Oak Tree’. No harm was done to the tree in the process and a great deal of care was taken to remove the soil from around their dense root system.
Once the tree was re-potted, several smaller roots were left unearthed as they did not form part of the tree’s predominant root structure. Some time later these were taken off and used to produce a series of what I’ve come to call Rhizotypes, a combination of the Greek word rhizo, meaning root, and týpos meaning imprint. As such, the project developed from its initial stages to overcome physical connection to the Queen Elizabeth I Oak, into an examination of the oak tree’s hidden world beneath the soil.
Stages I, II and II of Unearthing an Oak Tree, Thorngrafton, Kings Caple, Hereford, UK, from the series Organic Impressions as part of the practice-based PhD project ‘These Rooted Bodies: Photographic Encounters with Plant Intelligence and the English oak tree through Material, Theory and Practice’. 2022. Digital scans from 120mm negative.
“This focus on components of the oak tree that predominantly exist unseen within the earth could be thought of here as exemplifying the chthonic, a Greek term that refers to living in, under or beneath the earth. As photographic historian Jane Vuorinen notes, the chthonic is often associated with notions of death; soil being a repository for decay and degeneration or “a dangerous underworld where living beings should not enter” (Vuorinen, 2023: 10). To the zoologist and ecofeminist scholar Donna J. Haraway, the chthonic is even conceived as a conceptual tool to move away from notions of the Anthropocene (the acknowledgement of human activity having a significant impact on the earth’s climate and ecosystem) and towards what she calls the Chthulucene, that which requires a form of ‘sympoeisis’, or making-with, holding at once the intertwined realities of humans, animals and plants (Hathaway, 2016: 59).
In its broadest sense, the notion of sympoeisis accepts that “nothing makes itself: nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing” (Hathaway, 2016: 58). In terms of creative methods, notions of sympoeisis, as Hathaway describes it, also function to detail the ways in which my own practice engages with plants to create images with them. These concepts are, of course, not specific to Organic Impressions, but relate to all the sub-projects. In the case of both Organic Impressions and Arboreal Encounters, these forms of sympoeisis result in images that are not only of something but also are something in and of themselves: “they are not the absent subject made present by way of a figurative likeness, but the actual presence of that subject, in its ever-changing, ever-evolving temporal ongoing” (Vuorinen, 2023: 11). Although these observations are more directly related to the Chthonotypes in that the prints both represent and are made of the earth, the Rhizotypes also embody this function through the cyanotype’s inevitable, slowly fading impermanence, as well as their coming into being through the physical contact between plant and paper.”
— Epha J. Roe, notes on Organic Impressions, ‘These Rooted Bodies’, 2024.
Untitled, Rhizotype II-VI, roots collected from the lower trunk of a living oak sapling, and To Suspend a Root System, both from the project ‘Organic Impressions’ (2023), as part of the solo exhibition These Rooted Bodies, 2025.
Untitled, Chthonotypes I-VI, Queen Elizabeth I Oak. Soil collected from the landscape of Queen Elizabeth I Oak, mixed with silver nitrate and exposed on A5 watercolour paper, from the project ‘Organic Impressions’, 2021.
Installation image of the headphone set-up at RidgeBank Contemporary Art Space, Kington, for the solo show ‘These Rooted Bodies’, Aug-Sept 2025.
Our Roots
The audio here is a collaborative audio piece between myself and musician Joe Davin, made for the multimedia research and practice exhibition 'Roots: A Journey of Discovery into England’s Heritage Oak Trees', that took place at The Artery Gallery, Worcester, between 21st of July and the 2nd of August.
An experiment in the practice of disseminating research and theory in an accessible way, the piece brings together a mix of creative writing inspired by guided meditation with pockets of research surrounding ideas of plant intelligence, notions of the collaborative relationship between plants and humans, and light as a symbolic connection that links together the action of the camera with the action of photosynthesis.
The narrative was inspired by my walk to a tree in Kington that features as the subject of Perceiving Phytochrome.
Spoken word written and narrated by Epha J. Roe
Soundscape by Joe Davin