European Forest Institute – Tree species maps for European forests: useful resource on major tree species down to the 1km level accessible as GIS data. The UK’s Forestry Commission makes their datasets available (thanks Tim).
Posts Tagged ‘Trees’
Tree species maps for European forests
December 14, 2011Sculpture upsets coal industry
July 23, 2011
Carbon Sink: What goes around, comes around, Chris Drury
Chris Drury, who will be speaking in Ayr in the Autumn, has successfully stirred up a storm in Wyoming, as reported in the Guardian. He was commissioned by the University to create a work for the campus as part of its evolving public art exhibition organised by the University of Wyoming Art Museum.
The work entitled Carbon Sink: What Goes Around, Comes Around is made from lodgepole pine and coal, and brings with it the pine beetles. They are all connected in a cycle that is becoming more vicious.
But what’s particularly interesting is that this work has drawn the anger of the coal mining companies and put the University in an awkward position. Higher Education funding comes into sharp relief when the corporates and the politicians start saying how sad and shocked they are that the University would commission a work that questions the environmental credentials of the coal industry.
The classic line is from a politician, quoted in the Guardian,
“”While I would never tinker with the University of Wyoming budget – I’m a great supporter of the University of Wyoming – every now and then, you have to use these opportunities to educate some of the folks at the University of Wyoming about where their paychecks come from,” Tom Lubnau, one of the state legislators, told the Gillette News-Record.”
Earth First Newswire reports 21 arrested at a sit-in against coal mining
Beehive Collective’s work on the true cost of Coal
Chris Drury isn’t the only artist drawing attention to these issues, but he seems to have hit a nerve.
“By Leaves We Live”: the vital politics and poetics of the tree
June 5, 2011
Jennifer Clarke and Rachel Harkness are convening an excellent session focused on trees, referencing Patrick Geddes’ “By Leaves We Live”, within the Conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth.
Abstracts come from all over the world and take trajectories across the topic: religious practice and space; time and trees (both their metaphorical properties and their function as recording devices); private reafforestation and personal redemption; tree burial in Japanese culture; empathic relations with trees, the experience of life and death of trees, Basque politics and trees, orchards in Devon and fields near Stansted.
Trees
May 1, 2011Germaine Greer makes an important point in this article, highlighting the difference between planted woodland and succession woodland, or meadow. She regrets planting woodland twenty years ago, and she articulates the reasons why the UK Government’s proposed sell off of woodlands might actually have been a good thing. It is important to distinguish between pine plantations (monocultural and industrial, degrading soil and diminishing diversity) and mixed old growth forests, but the point about the value of meadows as well, is important.
Material Considerations
November 25, 2010Material Considerations showcases the forest industries and in particular, the current and potential future use of Scottish timber – from tree to paper – specifically highlighting the use of timber as a building material. The exhibition comprises three sections: starting with the forest where trees grow and mature, following on to the production line where the raw timber is turned into products and building materials, and a final area displays case studies and full size samples from recent Scottish buildings that showcase the use of timber in their construction.
Sust. Gallery, Architecture + Design Scotland, The Lighthouse, 11 Mitchell Lane, Glasgow, G1 3NU
“TREES are the largest LIVING things on earth…”
August 7, 2010
The next ‘Humanities and Climate Change’ meeting will be at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (The University of Edinburgh, Hope Park Square,
Edinburgh EH8 9NW) on Wednesday, 25 August, 1-2pm.
Tim Collins will discuss his work with Reiko Goto and their approach to the theory and practice that informs Eden3, an artist-led climate change research initiative. He will present their work on “Plein Air: The Ethical, Aesthetic Impulse” a technology informed artist’s easel that reveals the breath of a tree as it reacts to carbon dioxide. He will also present the video “A Tree is a LIVING Thing: (The Schelling-Piper Experiments)”.
Tim Collins is an environmental art researcher, theorist, teacher and practitioner. Working at IASH he has renewed his interest in German aesthetics to better understand ideas of freedom and subjectivity and the intellectual relationship between society and nature. This work informed the development of a book proposal, tentatively titled ‘Art Environment and Aesthetics: Living in a Changing Landscape.’
Ten years of Collins’ and Goto’s previous research (conducted at Carnegie Mellon University) was recently published in two articles of a special issue on ‘Landscape, Cultural Spaces, Ecology.’ in RACAR – The Canadian Art Review, Vol 35, No 1 (2010).
Please let IASH know if you are able to attend (iash@ed.ac.uk).
Plein Air: The Ethical Aesthetic Impulse
July 8, 2010
Plein Air at Peacock Visual Arts Aberdeen (photo supplied by artists)
In “Plein Air: The Ethical Aesthetic Impulse”, Reiko Goto and Tim Collins exhibit a box easel for the 21st Century. Like the 19th century realists and impressionists before them, these artists seek authentic experience ‘in nature.’ The artwork experiments with new empathic, body/mind relationships with trees in cities.
The ‘plein air’ easel for this exhibition has developed technological devices that allow people to observe and listen to a tree as it responds to atmospheric changes caused by human transport and habitation. The artists engage specific trees in public places between the Don River and the Dee River in Aberdeen.
Venue: Peacock Visual Arts, Castle Street, Aberdeen, 3 July – 14 August 2010
Website: http://www.collinsandgoto.com
Publication: Collins Goto Plein Air Exhibition Text 2
Trees, Woods and Forests
June 7, 2010
Assembling some links related to Trees, Woods and Forests:
Jen Clarke is doing a PhD at the University of Aberdeen’s Anthropology Department “tentatively” entitled Working between art and forestry in Scotland
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/socsci/staff/details.php?id=r06jc8
The British Museum had an excellent small display entitled Imaging the Forest
http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/all_current_exhibitions/imagining_the_forest.aspx
I recently came across an interesting web site, http://www.wikiwoods.org/
Always worth looking at the programme of the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World.
Poets and Artists
The Harrisons’ work Serpentine Lattice is all about the temperate rainforest in the Pacific North West.
Thomas A Clark (and bear in mind that the Art and Architecture collaboration for the New Stobhill Hospital is entitled A Grove of Larch in a Forest of Birch).
Donald Urquhart
Roy Staab (search youTube for documentation)
Please add your own work or links …
Xavier Cortada’s approach to exotic invasive species
February 16, 2010Xavier Cortada, an artist working on projects all over the world, and based in Miami, has developed Hanging Gardens. a participatory work addressing the issue of exotic invasive species. He says,
“For ‘Hanging Gardens,’ I propose to create vertical gardens… comprised not of species we want to grow, but of trees we want to kill. The installations would be a series of five “hanging” gardens, each created using plant matter (e.g.: cut branches, vines, bark, cones) from a different exotic invasive tree cut down and removed from the local environment… [I will] work with volunteers to remove exotic invasive species from the community and use the plant matter as the material/medium for the installation… Serving as public hanging gardens, the installations … would enlist local residents in re-creating them at home. Making commodities out of plants and trees too costly for the state to remove, the eco-art project would encourage residents to seek, cut down and remove the vegetation themselves. Showcasing their work, these participants would then encourage their neighbors and friends to also “un-grow” plant species that threaten the their local ecosystem as vertical gardens in their homes. Indeed, through Hanging Gardens I want to encourage today’s city dwellers to go on a new kind of wilderness safari.”
In addition to the project taking place in Miami, and resulting in an exhibition at Miami-Dade Public Library System’s Main Gallery in 2011, Hanging Gardens is also being implemented as the final assignment (download PDF) in Professor Christopher McNulty’s combined intermediate-level and advanced-level sculpture class at Auburn University.
