Finding Tongues in Trees
Using double and triple exposures of 35mm film as a means of manipulating chronology, multiple times and places become layered together. The images become palimpsestic, reworked without prioritising one exposure over another, exploring seasonality and what can be brought from one year to the next and what has been lost along the way.
The series aims to also examine species loss as ash dieback is monitored and revisited across different times in the same photograph. As the film is lined up for a new exposure, there are mistakes where the image from one location is overlaid with another, confounding attempts to bound a sense of place within fixed parameters of space and time. The films are stored in-between use and as time elapses and the location of the previous frames becomes less certain, the multiple exposures too become embroiled in an entangled process of recovering memories of place and memories of the interaction between human and tree. The work's title references Shakespeare: 'And this our life...finds tongues in trees', with a question implicitly asked: is it the trees' story as the focus of the narrative or are the layered images only a reflection/projection of the photographer's absence, returns, forgetting and remembrance.
Placing such consideration alongside the grid of digital editing software and the rigid frame of the photograph, I'm also thinking about the ways in which trees and forested landscapes are framed and flattened within landscape painting, specimen herbariums and still life. Playing with chronology and trying to rebel against rigid boundary lines, I hope to find ways to navigate the liveliness of trees and landscapes as they refuse to be frozen in one time or form in the images.
