The Story of an Irish Wood in 12 Objects

In my previous post I recounted my creative day beginning with arguing about putting the big light on at 6am to make leaf sculptures and culminating in being seconds away from posting all that to social media before having to follow a gaggle of land artists to a hidden wood. Or else I would not be able to find it when I did want to go. When normally I would close the door on that creative spell, instead it had remained open and was still letting the wind and rain in into my front room and was making the telly wet.

In a defiantly "I can't handle being in a big group" manner, as we arrived I strode off in front to the pointed at destination, all along meaning to find it, see it, march back then return to press post on the post yet to post so I could firmly shut the door and start drying out the telly.

Avoiding the dog poo peppering the path I finally arrived at a large and attractive wood. It wasn't the final destination but it grabbed my attention.

It seemed to have grabbed many others too as rocks surrounded many extinguished camp fires and the detritus so often left lay strewn about here and there.

And then I saw an amazing branch all at once accidentally frozen in place, as a falling tree had severed it and left it wedged 15 feet up a dead tree's trunk, and also giving the appearance of it being placed there due to its aesthetic sculptural look.

"I need a ladder" a voice inside exclaimed. I didn't have a ladder.

Here alone, in a wood, needing a ladder but not having one I wondered.

Soon the following gaggle of artists found the same wood and I was no longer alone. I plucked some rushes, split them and tied them together into 10 foot lengths.

I tied a stick onto the end and lobbed it over the branch in an attempt to be able to hoist stuff up on it. This became a land art engineering exercise in the stick being too heavy and snapping the rush string, too light and not being heavy enough to pull down the cord so I could reach it and of the rushes being different strengths along their lengths so where I tied them together mattered too.

This is how it went for a while: selecting rushes, splitting, tying together, trying sticks for weight, lobbing, failing, repeating, trying again.

Then what should I do with my hanging strings? Well as this has been an oft repeated exercise in land art of searching for and selecting and refining. I would find things and hang them to define what it meant to be in an Irish wood. The same as it meant to be a UK wood with which I was more familiar.

First a mushroom, then a piece of bark from the tree it was hanging from. Then a stone, not too heavy, not too small. Then I made two simple little sculptures: a tube of rushes wrapped together and a stack of first fall coloured beech leaves.

Now what else would define this wood experience?

An empty WKD Blue alcohol bottle, a fizzy and rank tasty alco-pop so beloved of teenagers looking for drunkenness and finding vomit.

A pair of discarded kecks (underwear, international readers). I washed my hands afterwards But lets face it with all seen discarded ones in these sorts of places.

A bit of charcoaled wood. The sight of a burning fire is an ancient and mesmerising sight. Our species has been watching fire sprites and discarding kecks for thousands of years.

A disposable barbecue base. The clue is in the name, you don't have to take these home with you.

The inside of a Pringles tin with the cardboard burnt off. The pinnacle of drug food designed solely to make you more hungry and have no nutritional value whatsoever. "Once you pop, you can't stop" is the most sinister tag line ever. They're not even hiding it, if crack cocaine had a marketing dept. they could've used it too.

A flattened Heineken can. I imagine there are two types of teenage wood drinker. The ones who take their crap home and the ones that don't. We probably don't really notice the former and blame it all on the latter.

And finally a fire burnt aerosol can. One of a pair and a likely candidate for huffing something, there wasn't any graffiti. I've done my fair share of mind altering things, and if you ever read this far you probably think I still do. But I've never huffed anything and I gather it is peculiarly dangerous and weirdly addictive so it's probably best to stick to the WKD, mushroom and keck discard-ation.

So that's my Story of an Irish Wood in 12 objects as written at 5am on a Sunday morning in my dark Talamh hostel room.