I’ve been back from the London low residency for a few days now and I keep thinking about a tree.
On the way back from dropping my son at nursery I stopped at a tree I must have cycled past a hundred times without really stopping. I don’t know what made me stop this time. I just did. I got off my bike and started photographing it, close up, in the way you do when something has caught you before your brain has had time to explain why.
Later I started thinking about what that meant. I’d just spent a week being genuinely wowed by London, by architecture, by other artists’ work, by the scale of everything. And then I came home and the first thing that stopped me in my tracks was a tree on a Highland road.
I don’t think that’s a contradiction. I think London made it possible.
When I got close to the tree I started noticing the snail trails in the bark. The marks left by feeding and moving and living. And it struck me that this tree is an entire community, a home, a food source, a surface that’s been written on by dozens of species over decades. Every mark is a record of something that happened there. I wasn’t the first to find it interesting. I was just the latest in a very long line.
This connects to something I keep returning to in my practice, this idea that I’m not really the sole author of anything I make. The bees made the wax. The plants made the impressions. The sun makes the cyanotypes. What I actually do is notice, and then engineer conditions for things to happen that I couldn’t have planned. The snail wrote on the tree long before I arrived with my phone.
One evening during the residency I was talking with Jonathan and he told me he’s doing a PhD about learning but has come to think the word learning is essentially meaningless. Which I loved. Because the more I learn about art the more I realise how little I understand, and somehow instead of that being frightening it keeps feeling like freedom. Going to galleries used to feel intimidating, like there was a right answer I didn’t know. Now it feels enormous, like the more I understand the more doors open rather than close.
I think that’s what I mean by expansiveness. It’s trying to hold the world and art in as wide a view as possible. I’m seeing the snail trail in the tree bark and Emin’s show A Second Life at the Tate on the same continuum. Not a hierarchy, just a spectrum, and the skill if there is one is bringing the same quality of attention to both.
McGilchrist argues that attention isn’t passive, that how we look shapes what we find. I keep coming back to that. If that’s true then making art isn’t just about producing objects. It’s about tuning the instrument you see the world with. And maybe that’s the most useful thing it does.
The tree was always there. I’ve cycled past it and noticed it and appreciated it. But there was more to see. There’s always more to see. Nobody wrote about it in Frieze. It doesn’t have a publicist or a price tag or critics generating meaning around it. It just exists, doing what it does, being written on by snails and weather and time. And every time I look there’s another layer. That’s not unique to this tree. That’s what expansion feels like, not sudden discovery, but the gradual realisation that the thing in front of you is inexhaustible.
