When I Am Among the Trees (2020)
When I Am Among the Trees, is an exploration into the space between human and non-human centred perspectives. A woven space from willow (sun egg) that invites interaction, fascination and healing, as a way of helping us to reorientate our thinking to one of co-existence and collaboration.
This project aims to help blur the boundaries between a human and a non-human perception as a way of disrupting human-centeredness. Non-human beings are currently overlooked in the narrative around care, but what if they became inseparably intertwined? To care for something is more binding than just being concerned about it and requires active involvement. What if humans caring for non-human things became just as important as humans caring for other humans?
“Unpredictable encounters transform us” (Anna Tsing)
The ‘sun egg’ becomes an invitation to stimulate active interactions and encounters with our natural environment and to emphasise the sensuous aspects and create affective moments that encourage the user to take time to understand the relations between living things in changing ecologies. By creating a site-specific installation among a diverse location in the Swedish forest, I am able to invite and present the visitor with an opportunity to take time and be within an environment that helps aid healing and restoration.
Could the simplicity of inviting adults to take time to be more childlike, playful and curious, be a way of helping invoke new ways of thinking? An interaction and experience that will encourage a shift of thinking towards one that has care, co-existence and collaboration at its centre.
The making of the willow ‘sun egg’
I chose to use the traditional craft technique of willow weaving as a way of building my large self-supporting structure. To be inside a woven structure, hints at an almost architectural way of thinking – an experience rather than just seeing. By sizing up a technique that is usually associated with small-scale craft, I hoped that the scale of this object would make an initial and instant impression on the viewer. That on closer investigation of the object and material they could get an understanding of how it was made.
(Inspired by Elsa Beskow’s story, ‘The Sun Egg’)
“Childish delight” (Gaston Bachelard)
The aim of this project was to evoke childish delight and invite interactions within and around the space. It was therefore really important to understand the relationship between the object and person, which is known as affordances, in order to help me provide an experience and space that would invite fascination, curiosity and healing.
I designed cues and clues to help encourage interaction within the space. This included a sign with a simple illustration, willow mats and archways placed in a way that suggested to the visitor that they could lie down and enter this woven ‘sun egg’.
“How does a gathering become a ‘happening’ that is greater than a sum of its parts?”
Anna Tsing
Watercolours by Kerstin Malmqvist