Photosymbiosis: Towards a Method of Photographic Collaboration with England's Heritage Oak Trees

Research output: Non-textual outputExhibition

Abstract

This exhibition brings together, for the first time, four years’ worth of experimentation produced as part of my PhD project, ‘Photosymbiosis: Towards a Method of Photographic Collaboration with England’s Heritage Oak Trees’. Divided into three projects, this display explores three forms of creative and symbolic collaboration between myself and twelve oak trees.

Each tree is subsumed in human culture, each one having their own linkages to a story, event, or person that has elevated it to a certain cultural status. In the last five years, scientific research situates trees within their own forms of community: awareness of their ability to communicate not just with themselves but also different species across their interconnected root and mycorrhizal systems has begun to weave itself into the mainstream. My interest in this stems largely from how this new information situates the concept of heritage trees, forms of natural heritage that largely operate as cultural products.

To tackle this question, my practice-based research looks at how photography can function as a form of collaboration between Epha and the trees in their study, bringing together human history and organic functionality as a form of balance, but also as a means to subvert anthropomorphic tendencies towards the natural world.
Original languageEnglish
Publication statusPublished - 11 Aug 2022

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