Dalfsen Residency - forest studies date > March 2019
> This is the main image I have retained from this residency which was thoroughly rained out. The main work was an installation in the woods with forestry tape which I first encountered in the Peruvian Amazon where it was being used for scientific studies to mark trees on which seed pods had been counted. It is however more commonly used for logging and is made from Petrol in Texas in 99 different colours and patterns. > I also made a kimono with 2500 pieces of the tape which allowed me to dress up as a sort of Geisha spirit of the forest. The idea came to me both from watching Kurosawa’s movie Dreams where a young human boy barely escapes with his life after intruding on a night time wedding of deities of the wood who are dressed in the most sumptuous kimonos. The other source of inspiration was the rather more accidental self-portrait I took draped in a crocheted blanket that made me look like I was wearing a kimono. This set me thinking about the parallels between being a contemporary artist and a traditional geisha. Both are highly trained (artists often spend as long in higher education as doctors), yet neither is necessarily taken very seriously. Then again, both can wield considerable soft power through leading the conversations of society in new directions. Both are sometimes wilfully misunderstood as being engaged purely in the business of selling themselves whereas both may experience some level of emancipation from the pressures of mainstream society. > Another important element is that this forest in a man made industrial forest designed for logging and as such not really the natural environment we might imagine. Very little forest in Europe is intact, let alone natural nowadays. > While the installation and performance in Dalfsen were never really completed, a number of photos and related works came out of it and I don’t feel that I am done with the forestry tape yet.
> Further photos:
> Related works:
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