Cathy's Art Diary

Stunning exhibition at the Hayward Gallery looking at how artists have been inspired by trees over the last 50 years and in contemporary art. I must admit I though this show would be a bit dry and worthy but them were some wonderful pieces in it by artists I didn’t know and I found it a sea of calm and ideas. I loved Giuseppe Pepone’s sculptures taking a block of wood and stripping it away following the rings in the wood and knot holes to release a man-made tree from inside it. In a similar vein I liked Kazuo Kadonaga’s tree trunk remade from the thin slices of wood veneer it had been cut into. For once I thought two videos were the stars of the show and both were mesmeric and made you slow down and relax. Jennifer Steinkamp animation of a birch grove through the seasons condensed into three minutes was beautiful. I sat through it about three of four times to look in detail at particular season morphed into the next. Rodney Graham showed a sideways view of a huge pine tree over 6...

Nice event at Charleston Farmhouse to mark the opening of a new apple tree orchard for those of us who had given money towards it. This had been a long time coming as it was one of the Centenary projects however various very Charleston misfortunes had scuppered previous versions of it such as the cows in the nearby field eating the initial hedge that was put it! The new version is a an oak tree and line of Sussex apple trees along the edge of the carpark. As the gardener said it’s a long thin orchard. We had a nice ceremony at the trees where Virginia Nicholson, granddaughter of Vanessa Bell and President of the Charleston Trust, unveiled a plaque with the donor’s names on and gave a lovely speech on apples in Bloomsbury legend. A group of us who get tickets to all events in the literature festival had clubbed together to dedicate a tree to one of our number who died a few years ago, Patrick, so it was also lovely to see his oak tree with a nice dedication on it. I’m hoping...

Strange exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum looking at trees in photographs. This was an interesting idea but there was no narrative to it other than that trees seem to have been a popular subject for photographers since its invention. The museum itself commissioned a series of pictures of tress early on its history as a learning resource. There were some lovely pictures though including Abbas Kiarostami’s picture I use here of a tree trunk in the snow with the shadow of the branches forming the branches of the picture. I also liked a Henri Cartier Bresson of a felled tree laid out in sections and a Roger Fenton of a tree through an Oxford college window. Closes on 22 April 2018 Review Guardian