Nothing, will be the last forever.

Nothing, will be the last forever was the culmination of my six month residency in with The Wireworks Project Project in Shining Cliff Woods – a protected ancient wood set along the river Derwent. The functioning ‘factory’ I installed relied on a collective of hard working souls, who having foraged for wood, needles, leaves and herbs, processed them, using specially made stoves, stills and milling devices, into charcoal, ash, scent, food and tonics. With visitors invited, over four weekends, to watch the processing, ingest, smell and scatter the ‘products’.

Nothing, will be the last forever could be read in many ways. As a collaboration, a response to a post-industrial site, a comment on artisanal goods or as a process-led drawing based artwork… However, if we consider it via philosophical idea Metempsychosis (where at death the soul transmigrates into a newly born human, animal, plant or mineral), we could see it as helping migrate the woods ‘spirits’ – demonstrating how the end or death is no longer true but rather a simple transformation of form. Or if we use artist David Bomberg’s radical technique of finding the Spirit in the Mass “an attempt not at superficial representation, rather an expression of the inherent and changing energy or living spirit of nature and how one feels in relation to it”  the work is a lament; a poetic abstracted expression of loss in response to finding the famous ‘Betty Kenny’ Yew ruined and within a pathetic cordon, on a deforested ridge deep within Shining Cliff. Either way, I aimed to encourage deep reflection on our relationships with other living things.

The ‘factory’ set up included an exhibition featuring works made during the residency, this included the collages, With bliss I imagine this, that reimagine the Peace Huts built in Shining Cliff in the 1930s by the nature-loving-utopian group Gryth Fryd Pioneers. A series of photographs, Time don’t make it better, taken in front of the ‘Betty Kenny Tree’. Two charcoal drawings, I am all these things and nothing at all, made on the site of this once great tree. A series of interlocking baskets made from pine needles gathered on site and A dream within a dream, a fallen Yew branch from which seven lidded boxes have been skilfully turned.