‘In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.’
John Fowles, The Tree, 1979
The sensation that John Fowles so precisely anatomises is the feeling we have when we contemplate Guy Dickinson’s photographs. As records of the physical world and as pure sensory experience, their intricate visual fields circulate through us. Thicket is an Old English word, distinguishing areas of dense growth from thin woodland, where the trees grow more sparsely. With power and poetry, Dickinson’s images manifest the way these ‘thick’ territories are also thin places, where the veil between the earthly world and everything that is other feels most porous. Conventional polarities of form and space, light and shadow break down. Void acquires mass and the deepest darkness has a lambent quality. We start to lose ourselves and in this dissolution experience a thrum of profound recognition.
For hundreds - thousands - of years, we were people of the trees. Our earliest forebears inhabited landscapes dominated by vast forests of oak, ash, beech, elm, Scots pine, yew and chestnut. We lived, hunted and foraged in these woods and with its timber constructed shelters, kept warm, cooked, smelted and fashioned countless implements. Little wonder that trees saturate the stories we told ourselves to explain our origins and order our world view.
The first holy places in Neolithic times were artificial wooden groves of felled tree trunks whose coverings, Fowles observes ‘must have seemed to their makers less roofs than artificial leaf canopies’. Stonehenge he describes as a ‘petrified copse’. According to the belief system of the ancient Celtic druids, trees are the guardians of the land, doorways to the spirit world and the individual ancestors of human beings. When the druids cleared an area for a settlement, a single tree was always left standing in the centre and designated the tree of life. How much more compelling to think that man’s genesis tracks back not to the ordered paradise of a garden, but to the tangled fertility of a thicket - to one of Dickinson’s infinitely rich arboreal crucibles.
Alison Morris
