Ecosystem Services
Ecosystem Services is a photographic series documenting forms of trees as they are discarded in urban environments, in varying processes of decay.
The work considers the different modes of aliveness that a tree moves through -- within cultural narratives as well as in reference to its own bodily expression of agency -- and what narratives are opened or foreclosed when trees are considered objects or background to human activity within environments distant from forest ecologies. The work provides no answers and poses further questions on delineations of urban and arboreal spaces, when trees inhabit streets and human structures and systems of governance inhabit forests. Disrupting the clear channels of pavements, whilst joining with living bacteria and fungus as they decay, the trees here also act as disruptors to concise notions of living structures, living archives and material, as they too form lively multispecies landscapes once discarded.
The images are offered as a response to the flattened representations in herbaria, where plant matter is compressed, flattened and contained within the framing of the page. Framing these images as portraits, the varying depths of focus, photographic methods, including alternative processes, the series prioritises the trees as subjects, with the aim of eliciting curiosity about their previous lives, whilst retaining vagueness and unknowability. Are these images complicit in further flattening when they are taken in passing?Asking questions of who we give our attention to and what biographies open up when we are attentive to trees within cities and towns, the images will continue across different spaces and allow me to consider how t
The title refers to the processes behind assessing forests in relation to the ways in which they contribute to human life and wellbeing and aims to draw a relation between the objectification of trees in urban environments and the funnelling of forest ecosystems through data into human spaces of need and desire.
