Arboreal Laboratory

Arboreal laboratory consists of three intertwined gallery installations, which resulted from a two-year residency between 2002-04 at Stour Valley Arts at King’s Wood in Kent. The work consciously relocates a rural experience to an urban setting, and refers to displacement and longing.

The artworks were developed from a series of eight experiments conducted in the woods, which explored sound, scents, vision and time. It also involved a temporary artwork in the Woods themselves.

In mythology the Gods always smelled good:
The installation title references the god Pan, who, as the primordial renegade, smelled bad. His animal presence was dismissed by Rene Descartes, and our relationship with the green environment irrevocably changed as a result of this.

The installation involves four seemingly empty glass vessels (half alembic, and half perfume bottle in style), presented on clear plinths.

The vessels contain four scent moments in King’s Wood across the seasons, and were created in collaboration with Quest International using headspace technology (a highly sophisticated device which analyses and allows synthetic replication of smells). The results of this were combined by a perfumer, Dominique Le Lievre.

The ‘viewers’ release the scent by moving past the vessels.
The emphasis of this part of the project was on longing, on the invisible as opposed to the intangible. It also involved synthetically recreating the natural environment, and collapsing the annual cycle of seasons into a single space and time.

Cage:
The title refers to the fact that forests are designed as enclosures for animals, yet they cannot contain birds. The installation was a sound piece of birdsong – there were no visual components at all – and drew on research into why birds sing. Birdsong is also a good indicator of the overall health of a woodland. It is mostly produced by small birds that have to expend a huge amount of energy in producing the volume of sound required to transmit through the trees. Birds cannot sing unless they have sufficient food to eat.

The 12-minute soundtrack, each minute equals a 24 hour cycle in a month in the year, is a condensed and idealised bird opera over a year. It operates as a time-map of bird movement and migration.

Transpiration:
During the residency it became apparent that grey squirrels (introduced to England a century ago), were devastating deciduous woodlands by stripping the bark in order to access the trees sap. Without sap, a tree cannot produce leaves or transpire. They are also driving the native red squirrel out of the southern parts of England, and diminishing bird populations by eating bird’s eggs.

The triptych links the two other installations, and takes their premise further by looking at trees to explore the contradictions and complexities of current ecological and political debates relating to woodlands. Sap and chlorophyll are taken as metaphors for the symbiotic nature of woodlands, and our complex relationships with them.

The soundtrack involves a symphony of three different types of birdsong:
- One is stretched (apparently birds interpret song at 3 times the speed that humans do, so can distinguish complex readings of the call/song).
- One is in human real time - i.e. how we normally hear birdsong
- One is synthetically created using a mobile phone

Each video is a different length so that the each version of the birdsong soundtracks and visual narratives are perpetually re-evolving. The mobile phone birdsongs were created in collaboration with composer, Matthew King.

A female and male (Adam and Eve?) dressed as red squirrels plant an apple tree. The introduction of an apple tree to an English woodland is not unusual – historically it is a by-product of a forester's or charcoal burner's lunch.

As many of the arboreal laboratory experiments explored the borders of visibility, the only permanent sited work that Edwina wanted to add to King's Wood was another tree. Who would notice another one? The answer to this was that the resident fallow deer did. They immediately realized that the Wood's biodiversity had been added to, and promptly ate it.

This exhibition was also accompanied by a book, distributed through Cornerhouse publications (Arboreal laboratory: summary experimental record. Challock, Kent: Stour Valley Arts, 2004; ISBN 9780953534074).

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