Duir: oak : door

Duir
oak : door

This exhibition explores and celebrates the remaining woodlands found in East Lothian with their pockets of old oak trees. As artists we are working to highlight our dependence and necessary engagement with our environment and woodland through foraging, creating, learning and being amongst woodland for mindfulness and creative work.

The title of our exhibition is Duir which is an old Celtic word for oak and where the word for door derives. Oak supports more wildlife than any other tree species. This highlights the biodiversity value associated with them. They are also long-lived making them significant carbon stores. Woodlands are an essential part of our community and our exhibition highlights the necessity of preservation and regeneration.

The three artists contributing to this are Karin Chipulina, Stella Robertson and Anna Davis.

Karin Chipulina’s work includes eco printed cloth, dyed with local leaves from the woods using oak gall mordants, natural fibres, prints using local woodland, foraged materials and cloth sewn, dyed and worked on with plant fibre. ‘Within a woodland we can access free materials to use in different art forms. We can learn from working in that space of inspiration and use materials consciously to give a voice through our art’.

Stella Robertson’s photographs document the final stage of a performance/ritual called ‘Land Listenings’ where she works through grief with and for the land. The stones represent the loss and are carried on a ‘pilgrimage to uncertainty’ led by movement and sound of trees, animals, light and her own intuitions. This process transforms the tight grip of suffering into a more open, light and alive state. Facilitating the letting go of loss through placing it to rest in the generous arms of trees. Letting go of suffering is a radically creative action that allows us to see other possibilities.

For this exhibition Anna Davis’s work incorporates the use of traditional oak gall ink for drawing and sketching, in which she responds to some of the remaining oak woods in East Lothian. She is looking at our necessary engagement and appreciation of ancient woodland and touches on the old stories and wildlife that are connected to our woods. She brings poems, drawing and observations together into book form, and the process is in itself a waybook referencing the ideas of geopoetics.

A quote by John Muir: ‘Between every two pine trees there is a door, leading to a new way of life.’