WOODS

Have you ever wondered what happens when you return to a place over time and observe the everyday, the elusive, and the poetic? How does this process shape both you and the work you make? For the past ten years, I have thought of Wytham Woods as an open-air studio.

Walking is central to my process, and my body forms the framework that shapes and scales my engagement with the woods. Over the summer of 2024, I invited friends and fellow artists to join me in the woods. This made walking, both as a process and a form, a more integral part of my project and introduced an intimate, social dimension through engaging conversations. I recorded my observations from memory immediately afterwards. Each walk builds on these exchanges and links the different series together through movement and reflection. The series WALKS reflects on environmental and social crises while exploring our capacity for creativity, abstract thought and flow. In ‘A walk with Karolina ‘, the sublime appears disrupted, scarred by fire evoking climate change, splashed with colour as a gesture of protest, or accidentally damaged by light fogging. In ‘A walk with Thomas ‘, I explore how land is fought over not just for resources but for power and identity. ‘A walk with Monica’ taps into something older, survival, memory, a way of walking alongside those who came before.

Each visitor experiences the woods from a unique perspective. With this work, I am sharing mine.

A WALK WITH KAROLINA

A few days after attending a demo in London, I met Karolina in the woods. The conversation turns inevitably to the climate and the cost exacted from those who dare to act.

“Did you see the news about those Just Stop Oil activists? I went to the demo last week; I know one of them.” I said.

“Yeah,” K. said. “Hefty sentences. What happened exactly?”

“They were on a Zoom call. Planning the blockade. It shut the M25 for four days. They were convicted of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.”

“So, they’re being punished for planning it, not just doing it?”

“Exactly. You don’t have to be the one on the gantry. You just have to be in the room.”

K. frowned. “That seems… harsh.”

“It is. The judge said they crossed a line, from campaigner to fanatic. He called it extreme.”

K. was quiet for a moment. “But are they fanatics? Or are they just desperate?”

I didn’t answer right away. It’s a tricky question. Maybe both. Maybe that’s what happens when you see the future burning and no one’s putting the fire out.

“It reminds me of the suffragettes,” K. said. “They started out peaceful too. But when no one listened, they smashed windows. Burned postboxes. Even bombed buildings.”

I nodded. “Yeah. When your demands are ignored for long enough, violence can start to seem like the only way to be heard. It’s not always about extremism, it’s about exhaustion. Frustration. Not being taken seriously.”

K. paused. “It’s wild to think how quickly it’s escalated. First, they were throwing soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, and now they’re closing the M25.”

“And who were they?”

“Roger Hallam—five years. Then Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, and Cressida Gethin—four years each. Their Zoom call led to around 45 people going up on gantries.”

K. shook their head. “That’s intense. What was the fallout?”

“Prosecutors say it caused 51,000 hours of driver delays, £765,000 in lost productivity, and £1.1 million in policing costs. Flights missed. Appointments. Exams.”

“But they were non-violent.”

“Yes. And for that, they got sentences longer than for most burglaries. Chris Packham pointed that out. So did Dale Vince. It’s not about safety. It’s about control.”

“Is this tied to the new protest laws?”

“Yeah. The tactics changed but the urgency didn’t. They’re pushing harder because nothing else worked.”

“The last Conservative government expanded police powers. Now, judges are using them. Labour’s been silent. But internationally, the UN’s Michel Forst called it a ‘dark day’ for protest in the UK.”

K. looked out into the trees. “It’s frightening. If you can go to jail for planning a peaceful protest, what does that mean for any of us?”

This is a work of fiction; some names and details have been changed. The JSO activists have since been released from prison.

A WALK WITH THOMAS

We got off the bus at the Swinford Toll Bridge around midday. The hill ahead was steep. I had invited Thomas Nicolaou, a local photographer whose work connects Oxfordshire and Cyprus, two places shaped by borders. His project, Demarcation, looks at how these lines reshape land and identity.

His piece Green Belt / Green Line Conflation overlays photos of the Thames near Wytham Woods with images from the buffer zone near Famagusta. Both were divided in 1974: one by a county boundary, the other by war. These borders are more than lines on a map. They control who belongs.

Walking in Wytham Woods, a place both private and publicly accessible, made me think about land and freedom. Since living in Scotland, where the right to roam is protected by law, I have found these ideas more urgent.

Current conflicts show how land is fought over not just for resources but for power and identity. Borders, fences, and buffer zones become tools of control. These lines leave lasting scars, often with terrible costs.

To explore this, I reenacted Francis Alÿs’s 2004 performance The Green Line (Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can Become Political and Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become Poetic), in which he walked through Jerusalem, dripping green paint along the 1948 armistice boundary of the Israeli-Arab war. His act was simple, almost fragile, yet it drew attention to the arbitrary and brutal ways borders are drawn and redrawn.

I walked Thomas back to the bus stop, then crossed the woods again, dripping water to mark a line that split the space in two. Unlike paint, water leaves no permanent trace; it moves, disappears, and flows beyond boundaries. This reenactment was an intuitive response. Though small, it becomes a personal act of resistance.

A WALK WITH MONICA

I thought a foraging walk might draw Monica’s attention. Years earlier, she had brought me here, speaking of “by hook or by crook,” the old ways of taking only what you need. She had told me about Inspector Morse filming in these woods, a place where stories and history seem folded into the soil.

Foraging is never just about food. It taps into something older, survival, memory, a way of walking alongside those who came before. I try to imagine how hard it must have been to stay alive here. The woods are sharp, especially in winter. People may have lived here long ago, but they left no mark, no paintings, no carvings, no ruins.

Brambles have run wild, reclaiming areas humans once cleared. Some say the woods now resemble how they looked after the last ice age, as if wilderness is finding its way back.

On the track to the Upper Pond, we found blackberries, thick, dark, and ripe. I gathered enough to make a sticky paste. Back at home, I pressed the stain onto my skin. Each print I made recorded every line, ridge, and fingerprint, leaving a mark both intimate and temporary, destined to fade.

Foraging slows you down and makes you notice things you would normally miss, keeping you alert to your surroundings.

During the weeks I spent at Wytham woods finalising my project, I kept track of unexpected encounters with wild animals. Near the entrance gate on the first walk, I caught a glimpse of a fox and heard kites flying overhead. While walking with Helena, we spotted a deer standing still. When it finally moved, it revealed another deer nearby. By the Upper Pond, I watched common blue damselflies feeding. Later, I saw a blackbird, a blue tit, and two butterflies, one yellow and the other marked with red and black. I also saw a crow, a squirrel, and many insects. Finally, I came across a badger skull on a stump and, after examining it, left it where I found it.

Each time, as I marvelled at my luck, I asked myself: what does it really mean to be wild? These animals showed a way of life that cannot be controlled or fully understood, only observed. Being close to them stirred something in me, a sense of what it might feel like to live untethered, without fences, plans, or protections.

Foraging taps into that same instinct, an old, animal part of us that once knew how to live off the land. At the same time, I recognise that these woods are not wild in the fullest sense, not like Alaska, the Pyrenees, or even Scotland, raw, vast places where survival is uncertain. I find myself torn between envy, a longing for awe and freedom, and the need for safety and security.