The Trees of Turbulence
One of the strangest juxtapositions of the past few months was the arrival of springtime alongside the tightening of restrictions on our daily movements. On my street in Hackney, trees just outside my window foamed with blossom in a display which stood in carnivalesque contrast to the cloistered quiet of the road below. This scene was of course being mirrored in streets up and down the country and far beyond; the seasonal rhythm of the natural world continuing on as outward signs of human activity shrank behind closed doors.
Long before this hush fell over the world and this incandescent springtime began, Southbank Centre – where I am Head of Literature and Spoken Word – commissioned 10 brand new poems inspired by the Hayward Gallery’s ‘Among the Trees’ exhibition. At that moment, we could never have predicted the far-reduced worlds we would all come to inhabit or how the lockdown might sharpen our focus on the natural world. With characteristic foresight, the Director of the Hayward Gallery Ralph Rugoff had curated this exhibition to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Earth Day, bringing together a wealth of internationally renowned artists to reflect on the beauty and complexity of these vital organisms, as well as their fragility in the face of a warming planet. This timely exhibition spans the globe, from Colombian rainforests and remote Japanese islands to olive orchards in Israel and a 9,550-year-old spruce in Sweden. Across an immense range of styles and scales – from majestic portraits to totemic sculptures – walking through the exhibition is like finding your way through a forest of art. Branches sway in the digital breeze and gnarled tree limbs reach across the gallery floor. As with a real forest, it is impossible to take it all in at once, but this dizzying experience connects us to the immensity of nature and vividly illustrates how closely entwined trees and forests are with the human world.
One of the many joys of working at Southbank Centre is the ability to work alongside a range of art forms, and we have regularly commissioned writers and poets to respond to Hayward Gallery exhibitions: from Yanis Varoufakis on Andreas Gusky and globalisation to Hisham Matar on Kader