Today was our last day in Loughton Arts Centre. We have enjoyed it so much! We have finalised our exhibition plan and are waiting for photographs to be printed and materials to arrive. We have so enjoyed our time here and will miss the Forest and getting to know it. It feels like we have come a long way since our proposal application and our walk, which was only last month. It has been refreshing working with someone new and who works so differently. We have learned a lot from each other and hope to work together again, too.
And a huge thank you to Essex Network of Artists' Studios for giving us this opportunity - we hope to see you in the Gibberd Gallery in September for the final exhibition! Hannah and Cara It was another beautiful day reaching 22C! We have been so lucky with the weather. We spent a lot of the morning discussing colour. As this is new to Hannah it was interesting to see how our experiments would go. We talked about the colours we'd found in the forest (left by humans), how they contrasted with the colours we expected to find, and how to use them to our advantage. We looked at colour wheels and paint charts and kept coming back to the primary colours - red, blue and yellow. There had also been discussion about fluorescent and even neon colours, so we substituted the red for pink for our cause (This also struck us as the CMYK printing colours). Once settled we decided to flock our logs first (I'm afraid we are keeping the finished result as a surprise for the exhibition!), the idea being that flock has the same feel as moss, and so rather than just painting the logs we are assimilating them, covering their wounds with flock.
We also experimented with the same colours on our photographs, testing how the colours worked, Hannah progressed her practice as she already draws on her photographs (these are also an exhibition surprise...). Today was productive and completed a chunk towards the final exhibition in September. Today was a beautifully sunny day, lucky for us because we planned to go out into the Forest to do some plaster casting. We wanted to record the comings and goings of people in the Forest, showing how much of a social area it actually is. We found bike tracks, horse shoes, dog paws, footprints and even some tractor tyres (although didn't cast these). I (Hannah) have done lots of casting before, mainly for my degree show and mostly waste moulds, so I introduced this to Cara who seemed to love it as much as me. The back of my car became a mobile plaster station for the day with casting plaster, water, powder paint, frames, measuring jugs, bowls, scales, and even some lard. Plaster picks up every detail and even we were surprised at what we found in our casts, things we hadn't noticed in the ground. Once the plaster had set we went about taking as much mud off as possible too see what we had. Using palette knives and brushes we felt like archaeologists excavating an ancient site, wondering what we were going to find underneath. This felt appropriate as archaeology is about people as much as it is about the past, which is what we are trying to show about the Forest. We decided we wanted them coloured to show as much contrast as possible between the natural and the man-made and as I use only white in my practice this was something very new to me - I haven't used colour for the last 5 years! As we were driving around, looking for suitable sites we came across the Loughton Log Company who source, split and season wood from the Forest, and who very kindly donated two logs for our flocking experiments which we will do next week. They are some lovely apple wood, complete with new shoots.
Today we moved into Loughton Arts Centre where we will be based for the next few weeks. Loughton is on the east side of Epping Forest and within 10 minutes walk you can find yourself right in the Forest, not knowing how close towns and villages are.
Moving in takes time, bringing everything in, sorting through materials, research, finding how to work in the space and with each other - it was very different to my studio! We did a couple of little experiments with flocking twigs in bright colours and sorting through the hundreds of photos we took on the Centenary Walk. It felt like a good start and can't wait to go back next week. Lots of ideas happened at Cuckoo Farm Studios today with the documentation we gathered on our walk last week. We don't want to give too much away but we are happy with our progress and are excited to start at Loughton Arts Centre next week!
On Tuesday we completed our walk. 15 miles in 6.5 hours (7.5 if you count lunch hour). It was brisk and muddier than we ever expected it would be, but thoroughly enjoyable. We started at Manor Park station at 9am, with somewhat drizzly weather as we made our way through Wanstead Flats, originally a part of the Forest (at least its administration area), misty and with a few dog walkers, it felt as though John Clare could have been there, feeling melancholic. The Centenary Walk, it turns out, is not signposted, and we were surprised at this. Apparently the locals want the Forest to remain as open and "wild" as possible, as some parts of the Forest have been made quite park-like. As someone who treads the nature/culture line I found this very interesting, as people don't always realise how much we construct our environment. It remained quite urban, and flat and open, for some time: houses, flats, roads (you can always hear traffic, wherever you are) being visible from our route. We took our timings from the Friends of Epping Forest website as they do the Centenary Walk every year and were chuffed that we were on time so far. The Forest is very narrow in the south and although would have been more expansive in the past felt like it was trying to fit in amongst the houses and roads rather than the other way around. We made our way to Leyton Flats, still very open but with a few more trees about and some pathways had been created, officially/unofficially we weren't sure. There were white-topped signposts on our route which our companion, Stephen Pewsey, told us marked horse riding routes. If you weren't a local you would never have known. Tree coverage created archways over our pathways, creating avenues and occasionally shelter from the rain. The trees here were more expansive, having not to compete with others for light. At 11am(ish) we arrived at Oak Hill and the Forest started to open up, trees were dotted about in clusters and last year leaves were underfoot. It was getting increasingly muddy, accompanied by satisfying squelching noises, and my shiny new walking boots were no longer. Another hour of negotiating muddy tracks (and a couple of falls!) and our aching limbs reached Whitehall Plain, where we meandered along the Ching (a stream pretending to be a river) and flagging headed for lunch at Butler's Retreat, next the the Queen Elizabeth Hunting Lodge (which, apparently, has nothing to do with Queen Elizabeth I). After lunch and much needed fuel the path got a lot drier. We were joined for a while by Peter Adams, one of the verderers of Epping Forest, a post from forest administration that William the Conqueror brought over form France. He had a wealth of knowledge about the Forest, as did Stephen, and we were so lucky to have this inside perspective as neither of us are from here. Cara got all these insights on the dictaphone and we plan on using them somehow. Again, we talked about how there is a disagreement in how the Forest should look, between the "wild" and the "park." Coincidently, the park-like areas around Butler's Retreat and Queen Elizabeth's Hunting Lodge was where we saw most people. Walking up behind Loughton you can see the evidence of "lopping," or pollarding, a practice where commoners would cut the trees just about head height to use the wood for timber, kindling and furniture making. It was mostly practised around Loughton and as the commoners didn't want to travel far (or carry the wood too far back) it is quite evident here, as you can see from the picture below. The Forest is full of oak, beech and hornbeam, as well as holly and the occasional silver birch. We saw green woodpeckers (or as it is uncommonly known as a yaffle because of the sound it makes) and robins, and talked about Jacob Epstein who painted 100 pictures of the tree of Epping Forest and lived at Loughton for some time. Because the Forest hasn't been pollarded since the Epping Forest Act was passed in 1878, saving the Forest from enclosure, some of the trees have become, or are becoming, top-heavy as multiple branches grow from the trunk. This means that quite a lot of the trees are succumbing to this weight and falling down. Not good for the trees but great for insect life and fungus. To combat this pollarding has been reintroduced in some areas, not for the original reasons, but to save the trees and encourage re-growth around the Forest as the biodiversity can shrink in a worked forest. This was in evidence as we passed west of Theydon Bois. This became the norm for this part of the Forest, seeing more signs of human activity the closer we got to the M25. Bizarrely, the M25 runs underneath the Forest, to preserve a traditional cricket ground! I was surprised as my map told me we were on top of the motorway, but the only evidence was the traffic noise, on the other side it looked like we were in a quiet village in the middle of nowhere. At 4.30pm we reached Bell Common, Epping, thoroughly exhausted but proud of our achievement, especially me as the fall I took put my hips out! I would like to do it again someday, walking more along the west side of the Forest, skirting around High Beach. But for now we have plenty to think about, hundreds of photos, stories, ecologies and histories to ponder over as we prepare to move into Loughton Arts Centre.
Hannah We had a great day out in the Forest today, thinking about ideas, last minute planning and leafleting Loughton for next week. Don't forget we start at Manor Park at 9am next week.
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August 2015
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