During the process of project1, the critical moments of my thinking were based on practical courses and outdoor research and observation. For example, I did some sensory experiments in Greenwich Park and Hyde Park, and I recorded some of my discoveries and feelings through photos and paper media. When I integrated the information and refined the problem, through more specific analysis of the problem and discussion with the teacher, I found that what I discussed about the pluralistic relationship between human beings and natural ecosystems seemed to be very Emptiness is not convincing. With further in-depth research and communication with my supervisor, I realized that the problems in project 1 were due to the fact that the scope of my research was not specific and deep enough, so I gradually narrowed down from the relatively large observation range of natural ecosystems to trees and In-depth discussion of the close connections and similarities between human identities.

At the same time, I visited the work of artist John Mawurndjul, whose work has been reinterpreted in a unique and highly personal style. He is good at presenting ancient myths and life topics in the form of bark paintings. However, these motifs are often a continuation of imagery from ancient body paintings and rock art. At the beginning, I was just attracted by his pictures, but with a deeper understanding, I felt from his works, creating a unique identity through art and interpreting the instability and ambiguity of art from a critical perspective. His creations gave me new thinking and inspiration.

Therefore, I focused on the expression form of paper media. I tried the creation form of monoprint, and found that this creation form can make good use of color to create the texture and layering of the picture. But as the creation progressed, I found that every time I drew a draft on the plastic board, I was obsessed with the details in the picture, because those details made my picture more specific and thought-provoking. But there are always some failed results in the production process. For example, every time the paper is rubbed, many important details of the picture will be blurred, and even some key plots in the picture will be weakened. Therefore, after entering the project2 stage, I decided not to use monoprint to create completely, but I wanted to retain some advantages of the picture texture in monoprint and add details to the picture.

So far, my practice in project1 and project2 has not been successful in the images I made, but in the materials I know and the way I use the tools. My information collection and some sketches are relatively successful, but sometimes there is still some result-oriented, as if the final sketch has been preset, and from the perspective of the sketch, my picture content lacks specific oriented details.

With this in mind, I visited several local art exhibitions in London. Among them, in the recent exhibition of Tate Modern Gallery, artist Magdalena Abakanowicz's series "Every Tangle of Thread and Rope" attracted my great attention. She brings a variety of soft, organic fiber forms into her sculptural creations. A close connection with nature can be felt in her works. Her works come together in the 64-meter-long gallery space, and I felt like I was in a forest of towering woven sculptures. I get a lot of inspiration from her work, not only in the choice of materials, but also in working with a three-dimensional medium, and new thinking about the power of nature and the individual's place in it.

From this, I began to rethink the presentation of my works, whether it can have a pluralistic structure. Because I realize that my project itself revolves around a three-dimensional multivariate relationship, so I hope that by adding three-dimensional methods, my work will look more full and attractive instead of just a flat picture. Through the school's ceramic workshop, I tried to create a three-dimensional work in the form of ceramics from the tree elements originally drawn on paper, but during the initial experiment process, my creative thinking was a little solidified. I just copied my sketch mechanically, which made my ceramic device look too stiff and weak, which made me deviate from the original intention of using the advantages of the ceramic material itself to create. Therefore further improvements and attempts become more important.

As I discussed again with my supervisor, I realized that my research content still has the main problem of being too broad and not specific enough. So I decided to further narrow down the scope of my research in project3, I decided to study a specific kind of tree in a specific area for in-depth research. I searched and collected a lot of pictures and detailed descriptions of tree types and characteristics on Google. Among them, the beech trees that attracted my attention the most, because their vitality is so amazing, a beech can live for 400 years, can bear 1.8 million beech nuts in its lifetime, and their leaves will not fall off in severe winter. Beech trees are obviously living beings, they are rooted in the earth, they are silent, and they seldom move for a certain period of time. They seem to play more of a passive role in the environment than an agent. Trees are often placed in the nebulous zone between inanimate and organic. It's this uncertainty that makes the idea that trees might have intelligent and social properties both fascinating and controversial.

Since the days of Darwin, we've generally thought of trees as solitary, struggling, disconnected individuals vying for water, nutrients, and sunlight, with the winners always shading the losers' sunlight and draining them of their nutrients. In the timber industry in particular, forests are viewed not only as tree production systems, but also as battlegrounds for the survival of the fittest. However, there is now a large body of scientific evidence to refute this notion. Research by biologist George David Haskell has found that beech trees are gregarious and often form alliances with trees of other species. The beech trees in the forest have evolved a cooperative, interdependent relationship that they rely on collective intelligence to maintain.A passage from "The Upper Forest" suddenly came to my mind: "There are no individuals in the world, not even independent species. Everything in the forest is this forest." 

Therefore, in the presentation of project5, I used the beech trees in the north of London's Hyde Park as the entry point for my observation and thinking. I present my work in illustrations combining multiple mediums. The final work takes the form of a hand-drawn introduction book as a concise response to and echoes my installation. This combination makes my works fuller and can better shorten the distance with the audience, so that the audience can more intuitively feel the content I want to convey through the works. Among them, in order to reduce the sense of discord between the characters and the beech tree in the picture, I recombined the bodies of the bird and the human into a new character, in order to better interpret the multiple relationships between the beech tree and humans. However, in the production process of the introduction book, based on the experiment of paper selection, I finally chose copy paper as the material for book production. This kind of paper is very thin and has a very low density, so the images drawn on it are easy to see through. It can still be vaguely seen through the other side of the paper. So I took advantage of its property and deliberately left a page behind each image in the book to create an imaginary space for readers to see the image vaguely, because in my opinion this effect is like The meaning conveyed by my works is the same, so that the audience can redefine the individual concept of traditional organisms through this form, and convey my description of the "personal situation" of the work to the audience. Viewers can observe and think about my work from multiple sides, so as to obtain different results to establish the truth.

In addition, my installation uses grotesque and exaggerated ceramic figures to reflect the sense of imbalance between people and beech trees in the modern economic system, and echoes the characters in the introduction book. In this way, I want to explore whether the symbiotic mechanism of the forest ecosystem formed by beech trees is like human beings, a species that inherits the basic system of society, and by putting all the ceramic dolls in a square container filled with soil, and deliberately dismantling them Break up the body structure of some dolls to raise questions and new thinking on exploring the blatant structure of the natural field in the popular concept. The square vessel represents our inherent cognition of things, while the soil represents the source of life. The puppet image in the soil represents the re-identification of people and the beech tree as well as the shared inheritance of social basic system attributes. Empathy.

I hope to arouse the public's awareness of exploring and thinking about the subtle relationship between people and beech trees through my works, and resonate with the public to form an organic and benign discussion. The form of my works is based on my different identities, after repeated thinking and observation, as well as countless experiments that have been knocked down and started again. Through these investigations and analysis, I gradually found my own way of expression, telling my own thinking, understanding and speculative ability, which is my greatest achievement.

In the future, I look forward to continuing to expand my project on "In the Name of Trees" through my artistic creation, and to re-examine the possibility of discussing beech trees in other contexts from the perspective of human beings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Although clear logging is less common than it used to be, 40 percent of the logged area in the United States and 80 percent of the logged area in Canada are still logged in this way. In dense forests, the dense understory collects large amounts of rainwater, and the dense root network makes the soil more fertile and structurally stable. Clear-felling removes these "living sponges," destroying forest cover, increasing the risk of landslides and flash floods, depleting soil nutrients and potentially releasing carbon sequestered in the soil into the atmosphere. (GuXiangYuShiJie.com, 2022)

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Wohlleben, P. (2021) The heartbeat of trees: Embracing our ancient bond with forests and nature. Carlton, VIC: Schwartz Books. 

 

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Render, M.G. (2001) Goodbye to beech - farewell to fagus?: Report of the Transnational Woodland Industries Group Conference, 23rd April 2001. Oxford: Oxford Forestry Inst., Dep. of Plant Sciences, Univ. 

 

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Nosengo, N. (2022) In cerca dell'intelligenza nel wood wide web.Nature Italy [Preprint]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/d43978-022-00025-0. 

 

Kanters, C., Anderson, I. and Johnson, D. (2015) ‘Chewing up the wood-wide web: Selective grazing on ectomycorrhizal fungi by Collembola’， Forests, 6(12), pp. 2560–2570.  

 
treewalker-arborist.blogspot. (2019) A simple guide to identifying British trees. Available at: https://www.countrylife.co.uk/gardens/a-simple-guide-to-identifying-british-trees-85493

 

 

 

 

 

Powers.R，(2019)The Overstory.New York: w. w. norton & company