Project Overview

My thesis uses photographic practice to interrogate the roles of twelve English heritage oak trees through the lens of new scientific research that considers the communicative qualities of trees underground. The oaks that take part in my study form part of the ‘Great British Trees’, a list created in 2002 by the environmentalist organisation and tree charity, The Tree Council, as a means to commemorate the Queen’s Golden Jubilee. Subsequently named ‘heritage trees’, each of them are conserved and framed as tourist destinations largely due to their associations with human history and myth. But what are heritage trees? and what might heritage status mean in relation to living beings?

As a whole, my research explores twelve oak trees and the stories that elevate them to a certain cultural status, as well as the conservation practices put in place to conserve them for future generations. What interests me, and drew me to the concept of heritage trees in the first place, is their unique position as being highly valued cultural objects, while at the same time being living beings — placing them at a strange intersection between the human and the vegetal worlds. When explored through research that emphasises the communicative, sensory ability of trees, their identity expands beyond the limits of human-related imagination and the stories that can, in part, reduce their existence to a product of human culture and history.

In part, my thesis explores how photographic practice can be used to explore the inter-relation between the identity of heritage trees as both a plant and cultural product. To do this, my practice uses alternative photographic methods as a form of collaboration between myself and the trees in my study, often using elements of the tree’s materiality (such as leaves, bark, and soil) as a means to include them in the process of their own imaging (this idea is expanded further in each sub-project below). These methods seek to address the potential risks in over-anthropomorphising the natural world to the point of discounting their natural processes and functions, and prioritising human-related stories in an attempt to familiarise ourselves with the natural world.

Rather than individually over-emphasising the tree’s organic functionality or their cultural frameworks, my research seeks a balance, developing the ways in which heritage trees are experienced, encountered, and conceptualised as highly potent cultural symbols and complex organisms. This is explored and expanded in more detail within the sub-projects, each using different photographic methods to image both human and ecological aspects of the tree’s identity, considering them holistically. All projects below are a work-in-progress, do not necessarily feature final images, and are subject to change as a result.

Arboreal Encounters features a selection of hand printed portraits of the trees in my study, together with contextual information about the tree’s location and history, and features the first experiment with using oak material in the process of image-making. Organic Impressions develops this experimental study through using soil samples taken from each tree, resulting in a series of abstract ‘fingerprints’. Finally, Perceiving Phytochrome imagines how trees might ‘see’, drawing inspiration from a chemical pigment in their leaves called phytochrome that detects seasonal change through the levels of red light in the atmosphere.