“One who loves or haunts woodland”.
As part of my MA Photography at Falmouth I am working on a project to show my love for my local woodland where I have walked weekly if not daily for the past 15 years. During lockdown especially it was a haven, an escape from the four walls of home, and I didn’t miss a day – rain or shine – during that first stay-at-home order in 2020. You can see some of the images I made in 2020 here.
Place attachment
I’m interested in how we form attachments to places. Many things combine to give us that sense of “this is one of my places”:
Do we live there?
How long we have lived there?
Did we live there as a child (a particularly impressionable period)?
Did our ancestors come from that place?
Do we have particularly strong memories of the place, whether happy or not happy?
Did something significant happen there?
Does it remind us of somewhere special?
What are the locations you would consider your places? Do you have a “my place” that you will always have a strong attachment to even if you never go there again?
memory
I’m also interested in how familiarity affects how we respond to a place we are currently in. Do we glaze over and stop looking if we have been there often, or do we notice new things each time? Do we daydream and remember previous visits or stay focussed in the here and now?
Current work
These ideas formed the inspiration for my current project. I’m revisiting the paths I trod when I had nowhere else to go and I’m watching how my reaction to the place has changed (or not changed). How do these feelings affect which images I’m moved to make? I can’t help but remember the feelings of anxiety and claustrophobia from the first lockdown but these are overlaid with the knowledge that life has moved on and the trees in particular have seen it all before and will continue to stand long into the future.
This series is all made during the hour before and the hour after sunset. The woods are quieter and there seems to be more of a link with times past and times to come in this moment of crossover. If we believe the myths and legends there is also more chance of meeting the other, less wordly beings, who also love (and haunt) the woodland and come out in the gloaming.
I’m still as grateful as I ever was to the Woodland Trust for maintaining this and many other similar places around the country. I’m a proud member. They plant, protect and restore in more than 1,000 woodland locations around the UK. You can visit their woods for no charge, member or not, but if you can afford it please consider supporting their work financially.
If you’d like to stay in touch and hear about any exhibition I put on in the future when the project is finished please join my once-a-month email newsletter here:
