While trees are insentient organisms they nevertheless react to their environment, albeit at an incremental rate. A tree moves by growing this way and that. Its shape traces its behaviour. As well, trees are social organisms inasmuch as they prosper in the proximity of one another. It is these characteristics of trees that inform my depiction of them.
When most of us think about trees at all it is simply as a resource – both material and recreational. As such we are tempted to think of them as existing for us. But of course they exist in spite of us, and in this regard I see them as emblematic of the natural world, that is, the world independent of us and our narrow interests and preoccupations.
My drawings are acts of veneration of the natural world that trees epitomise for me. In my sculptures I have striven to communicate the dynamism of trees – a dynamism we are apt to overlook because of the slowness of their growth. The sculptures are designed as free-standing forms. Their shapes are suggested to me by the branches I collect. My job has been to assemble them. And these assemblies, I have subsequently discovered, resemble animated creatures. Maybe they are manifestations of what in mythology are called ‘tree spirits’ or ‘drayads’. The poet Siegfried Sassoon sets the stage:
Drayads
When meadows are grey with the morn
In the dusk of the woods it is night:
The oak and the birch and the pine
War with the glimmer of light.
Dryads brown as the leaf
Move in the gloom of the glade;
When meadows are grey with the morn
Dim night in the wood has delayed.
The cocks that crow to the land
Are faint and hollow and shrill:
Dryads brown as the leaf
Whisper, and hide, and are still.
Hugh Alcock, November 2019