Sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus) grows like a weed in
London. You’ll find it sprouting
all over the city alongside fences, railings and buildings. Any bit of
unattended ground is an ideal home for this opportunistic plant and with all
the rain we’ve had in recent weeks, what were small shoots a while back now
amount to small woodland areas.
This is the case near my studio, where I’ve gone out to collect some
equipped with a saw and pair of loppers. Who am I to turn down free materials?
The aim was to strip the bark off the wood collected and use
it for plaiting and weaving. So
far I’ve used every part of the tree but the leaves, so these trees haven’t
been felled in vain. If I was making garments, this approach would be equivalent
to
zero waste pattern cutting. All this has led to really interesting
experimentation. I’ve assembled,
plaited, coiled and twined the leaf stalks to make nest like constructions and
baskets. I’ve bent, split and
joined freshly stripped branches to make bowl and plate shaped recipients. I’ll be working with the leaves next,
so keep your eyes peeled on this coming week’s
dailymades. I was only looking
at an old catalogue of
Andy Goldsworthy the other day. Such inspiration… If
anyone knows how to work with leaves, he does!
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| stripped and bent sycamore |
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| sycamore leaf stalks and branches |
I’ve yet to find out what will come of all this work I’ve
done: the development of new products, fresh ideas and approaches for making
sculptures, new activities to be practiced in future collaborative projects…
It’s too early to say, but I’ve realised there is something fundamental about
working with trees. It has
something to do about connection you’re making with the environment. Phil
Macnaghten writes eloquently in his short essay on trees in
Patterned Ground: Entanglements of Nature and Culture, about their ‘dynamic temporality’, their
‘contribution to a sense of place’, and their relationship with people being
historically ‘intimate and productive, reflected in customs of hunting,
foraging, burning, beekeeping, building, grazing, and so on…’. He also says trees ‘exhibit a rhythmic
pattern of persistence and change, from the swaying, bending and twisting of
branches, to the growth of leaves and ripening of fruit, to eventual death and
decay. Trees embody an
intergenerational model of time’.
It is possibly this idea of time that has drawn me in, something that is
of course pertinent to making, and weaving in particular.
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| sycamore leaf stalks |
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| plaited and coiled sycamore leaf stalks |
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| sycamore seeds, leaf stalks and bindweed |
Foraging for sycamore has left me wanting to know much more
than simply weaving with bark, so it is no surprise to find out that the
symbolic meaning of sycamore is curiosity.
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| sycamore bark |
