- By Anoushka Cole

I'm an artist and maker with a focus on materials and process. I often start new work by limiting myself to a particular resource, sometimes waste, but more increasingly I like to work with the natural materials found in a chosen environment. This material led enquiry allows me to research my subject through hands on making, often learning intuitively through doing and searching for appropriate heritage crafts and shared historical making knowledge.

Responding to the environment of West Dean, I spent my residency focusing on the trees and woodland of the college, exploring the arboretum, broader estate and surrounding areas of the South Downs. Spending a lot of time walking amongst the trees, collecting fallen materials and searching for interesting textures for graphite rubbings and relief prints, I allowed the trees to guide my time and play a direct part in the work I was producing. Acknowledging human impact on woodlands and understanding how few wild spaces there are left in the UK, I leant into the interspecies relationship we have with the trees around us; building awareness that the more time we spend in woods, working with trees as a resource, and ultimately managing woodlands to protect their future the more we connect with them.

During my research I became interested in the difference between trees and wood, one a living entity and the latter a material object to be worked or burnt to suit our own needs. I’m interested in using the material to tell the story of the life of the tree lived before, to include the tree in the creative process, highlighting the growth rings and wood grain, carving these deeper into the surface of the wood and putting these patterns at the forefront through woodblock printing. I spoke with the estates team to access some of the felled trees on the estate, collecting some pine with beautiful growth rings and I worked in the forge to raise the grain through scorching. I will carve into these pieces further, following the lines laid by the trees lifecycle to firstly create prints before allowing the wood to become the final object.

My time at West Dean has given me the space I needed to process a change in working environments and a shift in focus since leaving the busyness of London a year ago to develop my practice in a more rural location. Having always paid close attention to patterns in nature and working with gathered and foraged resources, West Dean provided a logical next step to connect on a deeper level with woodland spaces whilst also connecting with the practitioners working at the college. Surrounded by such a high level of craft and devotion to materials encouraged me to look beyond wood as a printing medium and open up the possibilities of working with this material as the end artefact. Spending time with MFA Fine Art students in our shared studio spaces fostered conversations around the process of slow making, intuitive learning and a shared sensibility towards the landscape. This experience was incredibly valuable and something that I will take home to my studio amongst the trees.