Now available to purchase here. You can read the introduction below and look at some photographs of the book too.
Hello,
It’s February 2025 and I’m back in the forest. The elastic band that pulls me here keeps thrumming like it’s being played by the cold Scottish wind.
This is the second book of Polaroid photographs I’ve made about this woodland; the first was made in the Winter of 2022-23. This one is different, but also the same. We’ve gone back in time to Autumn, and forward into 2024. I’ve laid this book out in a kind of chronological order, using the days and the months, but disregarding the year. The photographs are from 2023 and 204, and the words are from 2022 and 2023. That’s not to imply that the woods are the same every year; it’s more to compress and distill the work I’ve been making in the woods that’s been ongoing since 2022. Everything in here is constantly changing.
I’ve stopped numbering the trees I’ve been photographing in this book, as the work following trees damaged in Storm Arwen (2021),has resolved into a film; Landscape Landscape.
Autumn is obviously gorgeous, abundant and complex, and it’s impossible to catch a season in little chemical squared and scribbled notes, but I tried anyway. I hope you enjoy this attempt to communicate this little patch of land, and I hope that in sharing my love of this place, I can be a part of the work to save the other, countless little patches of paradise that are also under threat.
That being said, right now, this small patch of woodland is waiting to be overhauled by Forestry & Land Scotland, who manage it. Their plans, as far as I can tell, are to flatten most of the place. It’s not officially an ancient woodland, so therefore protected only by locals’ objections, which are frankly, ignored. I’m honestly not sure what the spring edition of this series could look like. In hope, I’ve put the only piece of advice I can really offer to anyone on the next page.
Jessie x
Go for a walk in the woods
Jessie Growden 