How Nature Builds (part 1)

‘I am rooted but I flow’ -Virginia Woolf, The Waves

How Nature Builds is an ongoing series of workshops collaborating with Oxford-based artists and working between Wytham Woods and Modern Art Oxford.

Between February and early March 2020, the first iteration of these workshops with Modern Art Oxford took place between the gallery and Wytham woodland. We explored different material processes as ways of responding to woodland ecologies and considered how bodies and environments shape each other across time scales, from fossilised marine creatures to limestone and clay deposits in ancient woodland. Participants investigated ways of drawing, painting and sculpting with materials from the woodland in response to thinking about carbon cycles and processes of composition and decomposition through layers of sediment and soil memory.

Creative exploration explored three key themes as approaches to making work:

1. Second skin- Layers (outside bodies and surface encounters): Sensing

2. Beneath the surface- Extracts (inside bodies and beneath soil layers): Mapping

3. Flowing with Fractals- Flows (moving between inside and outside): Moving