The end of the working year called for a much-needed research trip to the Tuechan woodland to get a feel for this important green space.
It represents a rare thing in Scotland and an unusual example, especially for the central belt: land secured through grassroots efforts to gain full community ownership. It should not be as hard as it currently is but local efforts here rescued the woodland from the claws of profit and capitalism. The woodland can now be managed for all the human benefits it brings to well-being and its vital contribution to halting our national biodiversity crisis.
It was great to see all the efforts to support the ecology, like leaving felled dead wood for wildlife and the many bird boxes placed on its eastern edge.
On the day I visited—Christmas Eve Eve—it was the start of an unseasonably mild warm spell, with the temperature jumping up to 10°C. The wood was enveloped in a cloud of smirry rain, and the call of the birds felt shockingly more reminiscent of their spring calls in the gaps between the thundering rumble of planes at the nearby airport coming and going for the holidays. I found many blue tits flitting their way between the shelter of the evergreen holly bushes and the weird shapes of alien fungi common to winter, like Candlesnuff fungus (Xylaria hypoxylon) and Dead Man’s Fingers (Xylaria polymorpha).
In reflecting artistically on such a place, I am thinking about how digital art can talk about such spaces, to augment and bring to light the work that all natural places do to regulate our environment and make it liveable for all beings. Within even the most humble of spaces, there are incredible ecological stories unfolding. I am developing work that takes people out to these spaces to make them aware of what might not always be obvious to our senses, and works that bring these outside, organic, messy natural processes into our safe and often nature-free buildings. I am hoping somewhere along the way to see if it is possible to blur these distinctions. I am having to stick bits of unrelated technology together to do this and experiment along the way, but I hope the result will be works that can serve to create dialogue about what these places mean and why they should be of prime importance to us in being the life support system of the earth.
