Woodland Instincts

I have been thinking about the way we respond instinctively to wooded environments, and how they affect us both in a sensorial way and psychologically.

This week I will visit the University of York once more, as part of the Imagining Woodlands module, when students will present their own work inspired by the series of lectures and workshops that they have attended over the previous months.

In April I ran a workshop as part of the module for the second year running. The workshop takes place in St Nick's Nature Reserve, a 20 minute walk from the University. Having run this for the second time, it became clear to me that there was something inherent in some of the spaces that were influencing the students' responses.

In my workshops, I lead the students through a few exercises that aim to bring them into a quiet state of mind and begin to connect with their sensory responses to the woodland space. We walk in various meditative ways and begin to make modest creative responses. This, I hope, warms them into responding directly to the woodland environment in an instinctive and physical way. Having done this, I then ask them to go off and find a space to create something of their own inspired only by what they can find in the woods.

Their responses to two spaces in particular caught my attention. The first was a densely wooded area with a narrow, worn path which takes you through a cool and dark space, so thick with growth that, even on a bright day, it is shaded and has an air of mystery about it. Last year and this year, both groups of students who created work in this area seemed to respond similarly: they both created smaller, almost hidden works that you had to scramble into small spaces to see. They were secretive sculptures, modest in scale, and created for only one or two people to find, and not viewable by a large group. They both had an element of magic about them too, with a feeling of fairy or folk lore about them, responding to the spirits in the woods or the miniature creatures that might live there but we never see.

The second space, by contrast, was a clearing in the middle of another densely wooded area, but which had large structural trees with low down, strong branches or multiple trunks. Again, both years the group of students who ended up in this space responded to those structures by building into them with other loose sticks that they found around the space. The results were abstract but also huge in scale, quite possibly requiring some climbing to achieve their outcome!

It was fascinating to me that both these spaces had inspired in both groups of students responses with such strong similarities, even though the students themselves were quite different in character from one year to the next. They were both picking up the same strong feelings from those spaces and working with the environment itself, listening to its suggestions and responding physically in really appropriate ways.

The other creation that I enjoyed was by a group of students who found a large stick. How many of us have picked up a stick, one that is pleasing to hold, that is just the right size to be held by a human comfortably. Again, responding instinctively, the students used rudimentary tools around the woods to make a split in the wood, attach a flatter piece at its head, and wind it with weed. They used tools to create a tool. When they spoke about the piece, they said it was an axe, made from the wood itself, but possibly something that could be used to cut the wood too. It was a symbol of both construction and destruction, as it also had the potential to become a violent weapon. They spoke of the dual ideas of humans as builders but also destroyers, and how our relationship with nature can be either. Humans, the tool makers, building but in doing so, taking from nature's own constructions.

Again, I loved how these ideas had come from something as simple as picking up a stick, and how the instinct to create tools had led to this philosophising. I can't wait to see what they have been thinking about since and what they will present this week.

Thanks to the University of York for inviting me, to St Nick's for being generous hosts and to Suzi Richer for the photos in this post.