Trees in the city

This project has grown out of a longer project I began in 2018, the Street Tree Twinning Project (STTP). I’d been wanting to do some work around street trees for a long time – living in London, they are a real resource for me and I wanted to bring attention to them and honour them. Street trees tend to be isolated from one another, rather than living in community as most trees do in their original habitats, with their roots entangled in infrastructure (cables, pipes etc.), in often compacted soil, and subject to pollution, vandalism and littering. The aim of STTP is to create symbolic links between street trees, to make a sort of virtual community but also to draw attention to their presence as beings in the city. I’ve twinned trees within London, and between London and Gravesend, so far using laminated bark rubbings (the rubbings are exchanged between the tree ‘twins’, as above. But I’m not happy with these because of the plastic, and because attaching them with drawing pins (as I have in some cases) damages the tree. I’m working on some ideas for more sustainable markers, and part of the project of this residency is to explore materials like clay, printing on fabric or some more sustainable way of making the paper rubbings weatherproof.