In March we were set a project prompt that encouraged us to interact with a public site in nature as far as was safe to do at the time given the lockdown restrictions.
Select a public site in nature you can record using photography, print, drawing, film or create site-specific works by walking, using found objects, sound, performance or collaborative (online) work.
At the time I found this a very frustrating project, as usual I had several ideas I wanted to follow up and ended up not really finishing anything in the day. However, as my lockdown has been punctuated by many walks in the local woods with my partner it is a project that has never quite left me, and I have felt the need to resolve it in some way. I’m not sure why it bothered me so much, but perhaps it’s the nature of lockdown itself. This was a time when I needed to see something through to the end.
Initially, I focused on leaves and sticks; things that we could bring away from the wood as we were only allowed out for an hour at this point. I was also fascinated by the various structures that were appearing in the woods. I’ve never seen anyone constructing them and they have proliferated over recent months. I wanted to respond to them in some way.
After some initial photography I moved on to a painting that I created using just the leaves and sticks I had collected; this gave me a new lexicon of mark making that I enjoyed more than anticipated. It was inspired by having found a red mobile phone in the woods that we eventually reunited with its owner, an extremely grateful young man who had dropped it while walking his neighbour’s dog.
My other idea was to create a series of structures in response to the ‘camps’ in the woods and initially I planned to intertwine them with strips of family album photographs (found and personal). This was inspired by thinking about connections, family trees and entanglements created through our digitality but manifest in crafted form. As I created them it seemed like they were taking on a character of their own, an agency of sorts, which was interesting in the light of the recent reading I have been doing. I decided not to introduce the images and once they were finished we took the creatures back into the woods and photographed them near one of the biggest structures.
I thought the project was done by this point but one thing that often niggles me with these prompts is how to link them back to my main body of work and digital practice. It sometimes feels like they standalone too much and while it’s good to have the space to experiment I want them to stay connected to my wider work.
This week I found that link! I have been exploring Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) further, trying to understand them better as well as learning how to use them more proficiently. I decided to build a model that used an established dataset of images of woods as the training set, which took three hours to train, and ‘Essence of the Woods’ (top) was the result. I am definitely still trying to make sense of the technology and want to move on to creating datasets of my own, but this feels like a really positive step.