Collection: Emma Swift Kirkman

The Lost Temperate Rainforest

I spent my first 46 years living in the U.K, latterly close to the Lake district, an ancient landscape with fascinating history and home to the last few remnants of an ancient woodland or ‘Temperate Rainforest’ which cling on to the mountains which surround the shores of Derwentwater, near to Castlerigg Stone Circle, a place were people met for worship in the Neolithic Period.

On a personal level I believe that all of nature is connected and as an artist my work is always deeply rooted in nature and is intended to be a celebration of my deep joy and reverence for all living things.  This body of work ‘The Lost Temperate Rainforest’ was part of my MA Creative Practice dissertation enquiry and is my exploration in to the query “When did we become so disconnected from nature ?”

 Throughout history our ancestors have relied on their surroundings for food and medicine, taking cue’s from their environment. They did not need a calendar to navigate their way through the year, rather they were able to understand through the moon and suns phases, animal behaviour and emerging vegetation. I wondered when we began to lose this connection. The Gregorian calendar which replaced the Julian calendar is a modern day invention designed to maximise productivity. Pre Christian cultures and religions are loosely deemed ‘pagan’.

I chose to represent this enquiry through the Neo Pagan ‘wheel of the year’ which I considered to be a more holistic representation of our ancient and deep rooted connection to nature, rather than the twelve months of the year as set out in the modern day Gregorian calendar. I wanted to represent this phenomenon by using the Temperate Rainforest as inspiration to create a series of images which explore this concept. I visited the Temperate Rain Forest for a full cycle, observing the changes as my ancient ancestors would have done. Each image is full of local knowledge, symbolism, folklore and my passion of protecting our natural world.