Being With Trees

About

These painters and print-makers are associated with two contemporary organisations: The Arboreal-ists, which includes artists from the South West, South East, Yorkshire, Lon-don and Wales, France and Ireland, and the Urban Contemporaries, whose artists live in London.

BEING WITH TREES celebrates a shared love of trees and the vital role they can play in all our lives, in terms of our Well-Being, Identity and Sociability, and our understanding of Ecology and Climatic Change. As the author, Hermann Hesse observed: When we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. At a time of international anxiety about the existential threats of the effects of global warming, the role of nature and trees in the nation’s capital city has never been more pertinent. It has been estimated that we need to plant two billion trees, as soon as possible, in an attempt to avert disaster. This exhibition thus aims, with a political slant, to raise awareness of the importance of trees in the lives of Londoners. Themes and issues explored in this exhibition are street architecture; urban decoration; ecological dimensions; wildlife habitats; the mythical, the allegorical, the symbolic; our psychological equilibrium and well-being; trees in opposition to/in harmony with buildings; depositories of history and bearing witness; unexpected trees in unexpected places; iconic and loved trees/nuisance and unloved trees/diseased trees; and boundary markers/noise excluders/ barriers against pollution. In fact the lungs of London!