Thursday 2nd DecemberBurnham High Street
Festival of Light
In seriously sub-zero temperatures thousands of people attended the late night opening and Festival of Light in Burnham this week.
In conjunction with Flux Gallery, Mona Lisa Arts & Media http://www.thefluxgallery.co.uk/ and Outdoor Culture http://www.outdoorculture.com/
and with a lot of help from Tim Hand Production http://www.timhandproduction.co.uk/ we projected large scale images of the ancient trees of Burnham Beeches on to the walls of buildings in the High Street at 4 different locations in a project called
The Beeches come to Burnham.
The project was sponsored by Awards for All, part of the Big Lottery Fund.
Working with Transformers Youth Group in Burnham, we visited the Beeches where we drew and photographed the pollarded and ancient trees, some of which have grown into wonderfully weird shapes.
Viewing some of these from unusual angles gave interesting perspectives...The character of the trees has been formed over hundreds of years - the oldest tree in the forest is The Druid, over 800 years old. And it wasn't just trees that the group took photographs of!
Working with computer software I transformed these trees into even more colourful images and put together a show of everchanging shapes and colours.
We visited the Beeches at night - there was an almost full moon and as we walked through the forest we stopped to listen to the sounds of the woods at night. We heard owls and unknown creatures moving through the undergrowth, and our own loud heartbeats.
The youth group made paper trees in the shapes they had seen in the forest and we collaged these into their own forest on canvas, then the children painted over them to create this colourful silhouette.
The photographs taken at night were an inspiration to work with negative images and create a spooky night forest....
During the evening Flux Gallery was open
with the current exhibition of images of Burnham Beeches by Andy Barnard and myself.
