In the winter, when you walk up the hill behind Ashton Court House, you pass lots of chestnuts and oaks that have shed their leaves. At the top, you find more oaks and the ancient Domesday Oak. Over the road are more trees of varying ages. Some of them look like this. Has it shed it’s leaves, is it alive? Undoubtably it has some degree of life, it will be connected to the wood-wide-web, it’s standing upright so fungi has not broken down it’s lignin yet.

Abscission is the term for the seasonal shedding of leaves. But has this tree shed it’s last?

I encountered this tree in Winter on a cold crisp day. It caught my eye and held my attention. A bright winters day casting harsh shadows and with brightly illuminated highlights on the branches. I used the sheen of the chine collé to emphasise this. Of course, you can’t see the sheen on screen unfortunately, so you’ll have to take my word for it. As with all handprinted work, real life experiences are vastly more profound.

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.