Bermondsey Project Space, London SE1 3UW
Open to the public 20 April - 8 May 2021
Please contact the gallery for an appointment before visiting in person.
Being With Trees brings together a contemporary response to trees by artists who live in urban and rural environments. These painters and printmakers are associated with two contemporary organisations: The Arborealists, which includes artists from the South West, South East, Yorkshire, London and Wales, France and Ireland, and the Urban Contemporaries, whose artists live in London.
Being With Trees celebrates their shared love of trees and the vital role they can play in all our lives, in terms of our well-being, identity and sociability and our understanding of ecology and climatic change.
As the author Hermann Hesse observed: ‘When we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy.’
At a time of international anxiety about the existential threats of the effects of global warming, the role of nature and trees in the nation’s capital city has never been more pertinent. It has been estimated that we need to plant two billion trees, as soon as possible, in an attempt to avert disaster. This exhibition thus aims, with a political slant, to raise awareness of the importance of trees in the lives of Londoners.
Featuring Arborealists Philippa Beale, John Blandy, Stella Carr, Annabel Cullen, Tim Craven, Alex Egan, Paul Finn, Buckmaster French, Kerry Harding, Julie Held, Natasha Lien, Paul Ridyard, Nahem Shoa, Lesley Slight and Angela Summerfield.