Located high up on the hills above Stroud in Gloucestershire, Minchinhampton Common, is a 450-acre grassland common ground open for the public to walk and enjoy.
The area is owned and managed by The National Trust.
During the summer, it is grazed freely by roaming cows and ponies. Minchinhampton Common is a site of Special Scientific Interest (SSI) and is well-known for its skylarks, wildflowers, and butterflies, notably with the successful introduction of the Large Blue Butterfly into this area.
The Common is dotted with large Ash trees, some over 150 years old.
They are suffering from Ash dieback and are losing their leaves and branches.
It's a slow death, and it's not known how many trees might survive. Hopefully, the National Trust will leave these magnificent large trees standing to see if they recover.
This MA project is how, through art, to bring the issue of Ash dieback disease to people’s attention, so that they look up at trees and not down at the ground as so many of us do..
Wrapping hessian cloth around a diseased Ash tree, where people walk their dogs.
People approached me to ask me what I was doing, and we talked about ash dieback and how prevalent it is on Minchinhampton Common.
Many were shocked when they realised that these magnificent trees could die.
I found the experience of slowly wrapping the tree and adding clay that I had dug from Black Ditch, both emotional and cathartic.
Initially I tried splashing on the clay slip, but that didn’t feel right, so I changed to massaging the slip into the hessian cloth and this felt restorative. The leaves' shadows fell on the clay-decorated hessian in the evening light, creating beautiful patterns that shimmered in the wind.
I left the hessian cloth up overnight, and the next day, I went and added a red slip to the cloth to make it more shocking and noticeable to the passers by. To my astonishment, the cows joined in and were inquisitive.
They started using the hessian cloth as a rubbing post, massaging the tree further and rubbing off the slip.
They managed to undo the hessian cloth and begin to unwind it from the tree. Laying the cloth out on the grass looking like a shroud.
A red dot is a sign that foresters use to show which trees need to be cut down.
