Over the past three years or so, I have
photographed this oak tree many times from the same position, tracking
its changes and the shifts in the weather. It's on a regular cycling and
walking route; and pretty much every time I pass, I look at it and take
a picture. There are dozens of them now. An archive of tree(s).
I
think of it as 'my' oak, although of course it isn't. Somehow it has
acquired a particular place in my affections - a moving still point,
always there. An enduring continuity. A kind of axis mundi. When someone
close has passed away, I have
placed some rose petals from the garden (dried or fresh, depending on
the season) in a little hollow at the base of its trunk ...
Beginning last October,
this chronological sequence records something of the past year in the
life of the oak, autumn to the end of summer, with one image for each
month. Twelve trees, the same tree.
*****
‘Occasionally, in a moment of peaked emotion ... we will truly see
something, a tree, an animal, a neighbourhood, a loved one, in their
idiosyncratic actuality, as we suspect they truly are, and we are
overwhelmed, while quieted, housed, by the detail of their being. Before
this moment of recognition, they existed, of course, but now they stand
out with an aching clarity, which seems at once identity and a notion
of our relationship to it' ... Tim Lilburn, The Larger Conversation:
Contemplation and Place, 2017
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