The Domesday Oak in Ashton Court, Bristol is so old that it is described in the Domesday Book. If an Oak takes 300 years to grow, 300 years to live and 300 years to die, it is certainly in the latter part of it’s life. Boughs are held up by makeshift crutches, and although it shows a healthy display of leaves in the spring and summer, holding on well through Autumn, it is certainly a shadow of the tree it once was.

I made this print using two plates with two different images of the same tree. Trying to capture a subtle suggestion of a trace of where it has been. The resulting image is not subtle, but vibrant and full of life and movement. The orange litho ink and the warm Japanese tissue used in this print is a fairly unsubtle representation of the time of year: Autumn.

This body of work is based on the book by Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree. Trees communicate via mycorrhizal fungi to trade water and other nutrients. Ancient and mature trees nurture their offspring via these networks, as well as trading nutrients between other species. Botanist Simard has spent years working on this theory as part of a wider body of work, discovering what it means for forests, the climate and the wider Anthropocene.