I met Emma at Wild Things Forest School which she runs at my old secondary school. I started taking my eldest daughter there when she was 18 months old and we went almost weekly until she was nearly five. Emma and I hit it off straight away. I was completely inspired by her 'can do' attitude and in particular how she coached my toddler through using tools like hammers to bang nails into wood and saws to chop up small branches. I watched as she facilitated my daughter’s confidence and character building. My mind was blown and I wanted to absorb all I could around empowering my little girl to feel at ease exploring the outdoors in this way..
At some point during the course of our friendship, Emma mentioned forest bathing on her social media channels. This was a new concept to me. This Japanese practice is a process of relaxation; known in Japan as shinrin yoku. The simple method of being calm and quiet amongst the trees, observing nature around you whilst breathing deeply can help both adults and children de-stress and boost health and wellbeing in a natural way (https://www.forestryengland.uk/blog/forest-bathing).
I'd been in the forest a lot - we spend almost every other weekend there when life allows (I'd secretly quite like to own a bit of forest) but when Emma talked about forest bathing, I started to question whether I had ever really ‘been’ in the forest. Whether I’d paid attention.
My experience of the forest was relatively fast, hurtling (a word I use somewhat loosely!!) down the trails on my mountain bike. Paying attention to the twists and turns of the trail, the rocks, roots and gradient and using that to inform my choice of gear and the height of my saddle. But at the time she shared her experience, I was expecting our second child and had been forced (much to my own irritation) to slow down. What she'd shared made me stop and pay attention when I was there. The sounds of the wind blowing through the leaves, and all the different bird song. The shapes and textures of the different plants... the bark of a tree!
I'd made 'bark' style jewellery before, using a textured hammer. But I wondered how I could take this ‘real life’ natural texture and turn it into something made of precious metal, to wear - something you could play with round your neck or fidget with on your finger as grounding reminder to 'pause' every once in a while. Something that, when you closed your eyes, might bring back the sounds and smells of the forest a bit like when you hold a shell to your ear and you can hear the sea. I wanted to create some pieces of art to encapsulate all those calming feelings of being deep in the forest, that the wearer could take with them into the hustle and bustle of everyday life with all the stress and chaos that can bring. I started to wonder how I could create jewellery with the actual texture of a tree.
As a long term hill walker, climber and mountain biker, I'm a STRONG believer in 'taking only pictures and leaving only footprints' - I wanted the texture of the bark without taking the bark our of the forest. As I sat in our van on the edge of a field near a line of trees one sunny afternoon, while Mr W and our daughter were on a bike ride deep in the forest somewhere, my mind wandered, I remembered doing tree rubbings with paper and crayons as a child... one thought led to another and suddenly the whole process was laid out in my ‘minds eye’. I knew exactly how I would achieve that texture, while leaving not a trace of my ever having been there.
The next time we were in the forest I took aluminium foil - just the type you buy in the supermarket! Armed with my foil and a variety of burnishing tools (my actual burnisher, a metal spoon, one of my dapping punches) I found the tree I’d been looking at when I had the initial thought. I’d tried to take the imprint of the texture of this tree before with resin but it didn’t work. I was perhaps too inpatient to let it set. I burnished the foil against the bark of the tree, trying to get as much detail as possible without piercing the foil. I took my foil samples back to my alcove and got to work.
