Gnarly Laid Hedges

For a long time I’ve avoided responding directly to the landscape around me, despite living in a wild, rural place. I think it’s because I’ve found it overwhelming in its totality - vast, unknowable and not truly mine as I wasn't born here and West Somerset isn't my roots.  I think about this wild place I live in though, the landscape here is impossible to ignore, a bit like the weather!  What I’ve been able to connect with more easily (so far) are the fragments within the landscape: human interventions, remnants and materials that break through the natural surface. 

Having recently graduated, with an MA behind me and a rambling body of two year's worth of work that feels mostly resolved, I'm ready to shift.  The MA brought clarity and focus and a voice within me keeps whispering - respond to your place! 

So I'm determined to try - not to depict my environment not as a whole - (at least for the moment), but to respond to smaller elements that speak to me.   Currently I’m drawn to the laid beech hedges that criss-cross the Quantocks and Exmoor: their gnarly trunks like fists, joints and elbows, the way they grow at strange angles because of how they've been shaped and interrupted by the hedge-laying process. There’s something resilient and quietly sculptural about them.  They remind me of Arthur Rackham's anthropomorphic trees.  Hello, there's childhood again - however much I try to keep the past out of my work, I can't seem to shut it down. 

My process is  - Walk, Photograph then Respond.  Nothing new there - I've been doing this since my late teens.   I don't always draw - but I should do as I find drawing a good way of working something out.   An HB pencil, or a stick of charcoal, nothing precious - in a notebook or back of an envelope -  get it down before my wandering mind moves onto something else.  

I'm not an expert - but I believe some of these gnarly stumps are quite ancient - hedge banks which lined routes used by farmers for centuries for livestock.  Old hedge banks - a system of earth banks and walls topped with beech trees.  ​