- 1 Anya Gallaccio, as long as there were any roads to amnesia and anaesthesia still to be explored, 20 (...)
1This article critically examines contemporary art installations by two British artists responding to two major memory sites of British imperial and national history: 1) Trafalgar Square, one of the biggest squares in central London, a former imperial crossroads; and 2) Tate Britain, a gallery dedicated to the showcasing of national art and associated with the nineteenth-century English collector and sugar trader Sir Henry Tate, whose business was in part linked to the imperial history of colonial slavery (Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership 2019). Seven ancient, two-hundred-and-twenty-year-old English oaks made up Anya Gallaccio’s as long as there were any roads to amnesia and anaesthesia still to be explored (2002),1 while Palmer’s public work, Ghost Forest (2009), showcased ten giant exotic stumps imported from a former British colony, Ghana. Both installations exhibited the bodies of dead trees as their main physical, symbolic and ideological material to activate and reflect on the collective, conflicted memory of the British Empire, whose expansion relied on timber production, including for shipbuilding.
2The contemporary artists Anya Gallaccio (b.1963) and Angela Palmer (b.1957), both Scottish-born, chose to use genuine trees, some especially chopped down for the creation of their artworks, in their installations. Their works may seem to be ready-mades or found objects (Van Adrichem 2013: 227), but they all required the felling and the cutting of living trees. The pulling apart of actual trees, which some might find disturbing and even problematic, and the aesthetic staging of dead forests of uprooted and dismembered trees appear to play a crucial role in this critical, analytical and mnemonic process. Both installations partake of an aesthetics of fragmentation which materialises and makes visible some of the violence of past land and landscape exploitation. Drawing from memory studies, postcolonial studies and ecocritical art history, this article will probe the intertwining of the repressed memories of British imperial environmental history, trees and place through the close study of these two spectacular artworks.
- 2 See for example the temporary art installation Anya Gallaccio, preserve ‘beauty’, 1991-2003, 2000 g (...)
3For her solo exhibition beat at Tate Britain, London (16 September 2002–26 January 2003) (Gallaccio et al. 2002), Anya Gallaccio, a well-established conceptual artist known for her large-scale, site-specific installations made out of natural, often perishable materials such as fresh cut flowers,2 chose to draw attention to the material presence of oak trees. Her thought process for this specially commissioned exhibition in the Duveen Galleries started with a reflection on the history of the institution, the way “Britishness is represented by the institution” (Gallaccio and Dean 2002: 27) and the large collections of landscape paintings held at Tate Britain (Gallaccio and Dean 2002: 27).
4The first part of the installation, a group of seven truncated, rootless and branchless oaks, each about three metres high, in the South Duveen, was entitled as long as there were any roads to amnesia and anaesthesia still to be explored. The bark of each tree was nearly intact but the grain of the wood apparent where branches had been cut off – where scar tissue would never grow. From a formal point of view the irregular tree trunks echoed the neo-classical columns of the Duveen Galleries. In a conversation with another British artist, Tacita Dean (b.1965), Gallaccio explained how trees were meant to “function as both formal structures and as trees, […] hover[ing] backwards and forwards between being columns and the experience of a forest” (Gallaccio and Dean 2002: 26). The clump of dead trees was thus a “grove” in the playful sense coined by another Scottish-born artist, the concrete poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, who also reflected on the architectural connections between trees and columns – an “irregular peristyle” (Abrioux 1992: 308). To a certain extent, as Lucía Sanromán has argued, Gallaccio both alluded to and broke away – or free – from the tradition of landscape painting, for ‘the interior architecture […] served as a frame that sets the pieces in a perspectival composition as construed as those of a nineteenth-century pastoral landscape [, … while also] invit[ing] the viewer into the picture to move about that eerie forest and experience with senses other than sight’ (Sanromán 2013: 29).
- 3 Anya Gallaccio, now the day is over, 2002, 72 slabs of rock candy laid on wooden pallets (one and a (...)
- 4 Anya Gallaccio, as long as the apple had not been entirely digested, 2002, root ball of an oak tree (...)
- 5 Anya Gallaccio, the way things are – green with red, 2000, chromogenic print, 100 x 300 cm, edition (...)
- 6 The second half of the title, green with red, may also refer to Gallaccio’s perishable work red on (...)
5Further away in the Duveen Galleries was to be found now the day is over,3 two blocks made up of seventy-two yellow and orange rectangular slabs of rock candy (homegrown beet sugar and glucose) stacked on four layers and laid on industrial wooden pallets. At the far end of the gallery, in the North Duveen, was the hollowed root ball of one of the amputated oaks, filled with water reflecting part of the gallery space and flowing thanks to a dialysis pump – as long as the apple had not been entirely digested.4 The last work, a staged photograph shown on the wall opposite, the way things are – green and red,5 pictured the woodland scene of a contemporary Ophelia lying, seemingly dead, in shallow water and amidst chopped logs scattered across the floor, beneath a tall broadleaf tree.6 Overall, Gallaccio’s approach in beat eschewed any form of nostalgia for a romanticised, idealised landscape of the past.
- 7 See for example Anya Gallaccio, because I could not stop, 2002, direct-cast bronze of an apple tree (...)
6Gallaccio had previously worked with casts of apple trees,7 which have been construed as “memorial[s to the] former living thing” (Van Adrichem 2013: 228) but also involved destroying the tree in the direct casting process. The introduction of actual oaks in the gallery, this time involving another form of destruction (the felling of seven trees, though the trunks were preserved, however temporarily), allowed the artwork to reflect on “both art history (landscape as genre, and so on) and the social and economic history of the exploitation of the land, that is, agriculture” (Van Adrichem 2013: 227). In as long as there were any roads to amnesia and anaesthesia still to be explored, the artist sees trees first and foremost as social objects and agents, part of broader economies and histories of land and landscape exploitation. In an interview for the Manchester Whitworth gallery, published in 2016, the artist stressed anew her interest “in the social aspect of plants. We think of forests as wilderness, as sublime spaces. We don’t think of going for a walk in a tree factory” (The Whitworth 2016).
7Understanding how and where Gallaccio sourced the trees used in the installation is therefore crucial. The English oaks in question grew in the commercial Englefield Forestry Estate in the county of Berkshire, England, described by the curator Mary Horlock as “a privately owned, traditionally managed rural estate” (2002: 12) where about two hundred oaks are sustainably “felled each year, with over thirty trees planted for each one that is felled” (2002: 12). Horlock thus takes great care to ensure that the collaboration with the forestry estate is presented as an ethical one. After all, the trees selected would undoubtedly have been cut down for purposes other than art. In the installation the trunks became what we may call in-between objects, suspended in time, no longer living trees as such, and yet removed from the usual exploitative process of timber production. Now rootless, the trees have been isolated and extracted from their natural and socio-economic contexts. In what might be considered an attempt at artificially preserving, in all their in-betweenness, the remains of the trees, the trunks were sanitised, “kept under canvas so that they dry out in a controlled way [… and] fumigated before they [were] allowed to enter the gallery […,] both to protect the wood and the collection” (Gallaccio and Dean 2002: 28).
- 8 The adjective “English” is therefore not used as a nationality adjective in the present discussion (...)
8The artist, however, was fully aware that the felling of English oaks for the art installation could prove controversial, especially given their symbolic and emotional connotations for the public. Since the late seventeenth century, the English oak – the vernacular name for the native tree species known as Quercus robur in the botanical nomenclature8 – has also been, since the Stuart Restoration, the royal tree (Watkins 2018: 136), a conservative emblem, and beyond, a national symbol in the English, and, more broadly, British cultural contexts. Speaking to Tacita Dean, Gallaccio acknowledged that “there is a symbolic solidity in planting an oak, as an act of faith in the continuity of family and a belief in the future” (2002: 27) and that “the oak is a tree people feel very strongly about, so to break that tree, to cut it down, is a brutal and aggressive action. […] I was very concerned about this” (2002: 28).
- 9 Anya Gallaccio took part to the ground-breaking three-part art show Freeze at the Surrey Docks, Lon (...)
- 10 Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991, tiger shark, (...)
- 11 Damien Hirst, Mother and Child (Divided), 1993, glass, stainless steel, Perspex, acrylic paint, cow (...)
9Parallels may be drawn between this “brutal and aggressive action” (Gallaccio and Dean 2002: 28) and the controversial and, to many, provocative and shocking approach to natural subjects developed by another artist associated with the generation of the Young British Artists (YBAs),9 Damien Hirst (b.1965). As part of the Natural History series, starting with The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991),10 Hirst showcased sliced-up corpses of animals, from sharks to cows, preserved in formaldehyde solution in glass and steel tanks. First shown at the 1993 Venice Biennale, then at the Tate Gallery in 1995, the year Hirst was awarded the Turner Prize, the installation Mother and Child (Divided)11 displayed the bisected dead bodies of a cow and a calf in four large white tanks. To the art critic and historian Julian Stallabrass, the disturbing work staged the “metaphorical murder of the rural idyll” (Stallabrass 2006: 253) in what may be construed as a spectacular, radical rejection of the British pastoral landscape tradition. Where Hirst chose to cut up animal corpses, Gallaccio decided to cut down trees.
10Reflecting on the physical and symbolical violence at play in Gallaccio’s installation, Dean declared, perhaps also with Hirst’s work in mind: “I am probably of the school that finds cutting down seven oak trees disturbing. But then I really like the way you talk about it like a farmer who is happy to break a chicken’s neck because it’s limping. And that’s what you are like really, aren’t you?” (Gallaccio and Dean 2002: 29) Dean thus regards Gallaccio’s chopping down of trees as the result of pragmatic necessity, required by the subject matter of the artwork; and this pragmatic approach happens to call for physical and symbolical violence: “There is a violence in what I’m proposing, just as there was violence in what happened to the trees” (Horlock 2002: 14). To some extent, according to such a line of thought, making the violent history of land exploitation visible requires the formal replication of a part of the process, which becomes a way to explore some of the “roads to amnesia and anaesthesia” mentioned in the title of the work.
11To the art historian Simon Schama, writing in the exhibition catalogue, “the trees [of the installation] stand as a solemn grove of memory” (2002: 22). As Catherine Bernard argues, drawing on the French historian Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire, Gallaccio uses the very location – Tate Britain – “to reflect on the way it functions as a memory site” (2017: 45). Indeed, what is now known as Tate Britain was named after, founded and funded by Sir Henry Tate (1819-1899), an English millionaire philanthropist and patron of the British arts whose wealth derived from the industry of sugar refinery. His wealth was also, therefore, partly related to the British history of colonial slavery (Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership 2019). The physical presence of sugar (now the day is over), combined with that of the English oaks in the gallery, is another echo of the history of the exploitation of the natural world and human beings, as Schama notes: “it was the floating forests of oak which made the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, bringing together in unholy coupling, the self-congratulatory mythology of the oaks of freeborn England with the reality of the slave empire; the bitter with the sweet.” (2002: 22). Surprisingly for Schama (2002: 22), Gallaccio did not choose cane sugar but beet sugar from sugar beets grown in Norfolk (Horlock 2002: 14) – a product that has been (literally) rooted in the English landscape since the early twentieth century. Yet beet, of course, is a homonym for the word beat, which gives the exhibition its title, conflating ideas of “sweetness and power” (Mintz 1986).
- 12 Cornelia Parker, Endless Sugar, 2011, 30 pieces of silver plate flattened by 250-ton press, tinned (...)
- 13 Kayus Bankole [text and performance], Rianne White [filmmaker], Young Fathers [music], Sugar for Yo (...)
- 14 Since the 2010s, the monumental, site-specific installation A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby(...)
12Other major British artists have since explored the delicate tension between “the sweet” and “the bitter” at play at the heart of the difficult transatlantic histories of sugar production and consumption, as in Endless Sugar (2011)12 by Cornelia Parker (b.1959), who used a 250-tonne press to flatten thirty antique British sugar bowls and suspended them above the gallery floor. More recently, the British-Nigerian writer and musician Kayus Bankole (b.1987) created Sugar for your Tea (2020),13 a short film projected onto the façade of Edinburgh City Chambers, where he could be heard declaring that “there was nothing sweet in the bitter exploitation of those who gave you sugar for your tea” (Bankole 2020; Bond 2023).14
13The new context for the felled oaks seems to have been given more attention to by art critics – and the artist herself – than Englefield Forestry Estate, where the oaks of the installation were planted in the 1780s. Some additional research, however, brings other significant colonial links to the fore. The Estate comprises Englefield House, a country house home to the Benyon family since the middle of the eighteenth century. As the historian Kate Smith has shown, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century owners and residents of Englefield House, had many ties with the East India Company, including Richard Benyon the Younger (1698-1774), a Company official (Smith 2013). Although Gallaccio did not mention this aspect of the history of Englefield Forestry Estate, she did emphasise her interest in the history of shipbuilding and the fact that such
great estates were planted, or at least maintained, with the Navy in mind. […] Initially I wanted to bring a whole oak tree into the Duveens. My first thoughts were of how to address the volume of the space, to work with the scale; both the height and the length of the galleries – a bit like getting a ship into a bottle. (Gallaccio and Dean 2002: 27)
- 15 Yinka Shonibare, Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, 2010, 280 cm x 250 cm x 500 cm, National Maritime Museu (...)
- 16 The Fourth Plinth refers to the plinth in the north-west corner of Trafalgar Square, built in the m (...)
14The comparison between the introduction of the tree into the gallery and “the ship into a bottle” (Gallaccio and Dean 2002: 27) is both a way for the artist to discuss the technical challenge of scale in her sculptural work in situ and to recall the historical and ideological uses of oak timber linked to the expansion of the British Empire. In 2010 Yinka Shonibare (b.1962) took this image more literally for Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle,15 a public artwork commissioned for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London16 and now held at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. Shonibare created a model ship of the HMS Victory, with colourful sails in Dutch wax cotton, a fabric often used by the British-Nigerian artist for its complex colonial history. Lord Nelson’s flagship at the battle of Trafalgar (21 October 1805), on which the famous Englishman died, was then placed into a transparent bottle, as though suspended in time and space. Because of the apparent logical impossibility to fit the ship model through the bottle’s mouth, which always inevitably creates an effect of surprise for the viewer, ships in a bottle are also called “impossible bottles.” They often require the separate building of the ship’s various components – its mast, its spars, its sails. If we are to extend Gallaccio’s metaphor, is Tate Britain, a gallery dedicated to showcasing of national artistic collections, an impossible glass bottle?
- 17 I am here referring to the exhibition 1807: Blake, Slavery and the Radical Mind at Tate Britain (30 (...)
15Beat is clearly “intensely reflexive” (Bernard 2017: 46) and critically engages with repressed memory. As the title of the main installation signals, the work explores postcolonial “roads to amnesia and anaesthesia,” laying bare some of the British amnesia of empire. In Art and the British Empire, the collective publication put together after the landmark conference of the same name hosted by the Tate in 2001 – just one year before Gallaccio’s installation – the art historians Tim Barringer, Geoff Quilley and Douglas Fordham observe how “empire remains an unspoken presence, stalking the museums’ picture stores and haunting the footnotes of journals and monographs” (2007: 4). In her article about “The Spectre of Empire in the British Art Museum,” Sarah Thomas also notes “the virtual absence of empire […] within the collections of Tate Britain” (2013: 116). It is worth noting that the first exhibitions to explicitly explore the then largely hidden presence of the British imperial past in Tate Britain’s collections were held five years after Gallaccio’s beat.17 The landmark, though much-criticised exhibition Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past (25 November 2015–10 April 2016) opened only thirteen years later.
16In Return to the Postcolony, T. J. Demos argues that the ghosts of past colonial injustices “are often repressed in European consciousness and visual culture, yet still frequently and stubbornly emerge in its discourse and representation” (2013: 8). Referring to Jacques Derrida’s hauntology in Specters of Marx, the art historian accounts for the ghosts’ obstinate returns by arguing that “the colonial past still haunts us because it is a past that has not really past” (2013: 12-3). The ghosts “fly free” (2013: 12-3) because of “the negations, disavowals, and rejections of historical responsibility and present advantage, [which occur] in political discourse as much as in cultural representations” (2013: 12-3). In the section that follows, we turn to another work involving the exhibition of fragments of dead trees in another national memory site, and where ghosts of the colonial Empire crept up, it seems, largely in spite of the artist’s most explicit intentions.
- 18 Angela Palmer, Ghost Forest, 16-22 November 2009, dimensions unknown, Trafalgar Square, London. Pic (...)
- 19 The phrase “ghost forests” can also refer to dead forests converted into salt marshes in North Amer (...)
17First shown in Trafalgar Square in November 2009, the open-air, public installation Ghost Forest18 by the Scottish-born, Oxford-based artist and former journalist Angela Palmer offered visitors a spectacular encounter – both visual and empirical – with the past, present and future consequences of global deforestation. Ten giant uprooted stumps of rainforest trees from the Suhuma forest in Ghana were exhibited on white plinths in urban central London. These dead trees, which made up the so-called “ghost forest,”19 were labelled global “ambassadors” (Sumpter 2009) against global deforestation and climate change. In the artist’s own words, the “negative created by the missing trunks [… became] a metaphor for climate change, the absence representing the removal of the world’s ‘lungs’ through continued deforestation” (“In Pictures” 2010). Ghost Forest was then exhibited in Thorvaldsens Plads in Copenhagen during the UN Climate Change Conference (COP15) (7–18 December 2009), before touring to Oxford, in front of the Oxford University’s Natural History Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum (9 July 2010–31 July 2011). The installation has been on display in the National Botanic Garden of Wales in Carmarthenshire since July 2012; but it is the installation as it was shown in Trafalgar Square in November 2009 that will be the focus of our attention.
- 20 This Christmas tree has been donated by the city of Oslo, Norway every year since 1942 to thank the (...)
18Nelson’s Column became a key part of the installation, as the artist hoped “people [w]ould […] stand under the column and look up to the skies to the top of Nelson’s hat and imagine that that is the height these great majestic trees grow to in the tropics” (Such 2010: 36). At nighttime “green laser beams [shone] upwards to mark where the trees would have reached if they were still standing” (“In Pictures” 2010), thereby showing to Londoners their imposing height, taller than that of Trafalgar Square’s traditional, annual Christmas Tree.20 The location, however, plays an even more crucial role in the negotiation of the meanings of Ghost Forest. Because of its setting, the London installation was a largely unintentional confrontation with British memory – a collective mnemonic experience that not only conjured up the spectres of global deforestation, but also articulated a conflicted relationship with the imperial past. Trafalgar Square, one of the biggest squares in central London, used to be a key location in the imperial geography of the city – an “imperial crossroads” (Kenny and Pearce 2018), surrounded by “the imposing buildings of what were once two of the most important dominions of the empire: Canada House […] and South Africa House” (Kenny and Pearce 2018). Close by are also to be found New Zealand House, Australia House and India House, as well as the Admiralty Arch, the former official residence of the First Sea Lord (Kenny and Pearce 2018). At the bottom of the monument to Nelson’s military victory at the Battle of Trafalgar, which secured British naval supremacy for a century, lie Edwin Landseer’s imperial lions. On the north side of the square is the neoclassical building of the National Gallery, designed by the architect William Wilkins (1778-1839), who was responsible for the original conception of Nelson’s Pillar in Dublin. The Pillar was eventually destroyed by Irish nationalists in 1966, after more than a century of debates around the celebration of the English-born hero – a symbol of English and British domination – on Irish soil. Trafalgar Square is therefore a major British symbolical venue and memory site.
19Ghost Forest aimed, first and foremost, at addressing the aesthetic challenge of representing both the incommensurability of climate change, which often remains “largely outside the range of local, embodied perception” (Clark 2019: 38), and the partial invisibility of the slow violence of the environmental crisis, to borrow the concept coined by Rob Nixon to discuss some of the delayed destructive effects of climate change on the global poor. Such “long emergencies” (2013: 2) include “the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes” (2013: 2). Ghost Forest was designed as both a sensational and a multisensory aesthetic experience of a makeshift tropical tree cemetery. Visitors could not only gaze at the decontextualised, unfamiliar sculptural shapes of the roots and stumps of the dead tropical trees, but also touch, smell them, walk among them, thus making the absent presences of the severed trees more present.
20To Palmer, her work “carrie[d] a message of hope and optimism for the future,” as opposed to “yet another message about climate change ‘doom and gloom’” (“Ghost Forest Take Roots in Oxford” 2010: 4). The artwork indeed celebrated what the organisers described as exemplary environmental practices in Ghana, where Palmer had resided for a year (Dean 2009), and where a new set of legislation against illegal timber logging had recently been implemented, thus fostering a more responsible and sustainable forestry (Such 2010: 36). Yet the installation was not only spectacular but puzzling, if not disturbing, and morbid – a literal, three-dimensional take on the nature morte. The specialist in early modern English literature and textual culture, Leah Knight, has shared her “chilling experience of walking among these toppled stumps with their tangle of exposed roots exhibiting a grisly and preposterous appearance of rigor mortis” (2016). The monumental tree stumps, lying horizontally, like corpses, were effectively turned into environmental memento moris, fragments of a lost world and a world about to be lost; significantly, the artist had “originally planned to chop up the trees [… after the exhibition in Copenhagen] and hand out the pieces as thought-provoking mementoes” (Such 2010: 36).
- 21 Ice Watch was installed in three European public squares between 2014 and 2016: first in City Hall (...)
21Here, the comparison with the later and much-discussed installation Ice Watch (2014-18) by the Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson (b.1967) and the Greenland-born geologist Minik Rosing (b.1957) seems difficult to avoid. Massive fragments of free-floating icebergs harvested from the Nuup Kangerlua fjord in Greenland, weighing between eighty and one hundred and ten tonnes in total, were transported in refrigerated containers and freezer trucks to public squares in Copenhagen (2014), Paris (2015) and London (2018) for the public to experience until the ice melted away.21 The set intention was similar to Palmer’s – to raise awareness of the climate crisis. Eliasson explained he “wanted to give people an opportunity to come into direct contact with the reality of climate change – to see it, touch it, smell it [, … hoping that the] experience will, in turn, touch people, and […] motivate people to take action in response to climate change” (Eliasson and Cole 2019: 40-41). Many of Eliasson’s supporters saw the work as “a bold refutation of the efficacy of ‘data’ alone regarding climate change discussion, proffering instead in a kind of phenomenological happening” (Heuer 2019: 182), very much in line with Palmer’s earlier ambition for Ghost Forest in 2009. While it is true that the removal of fifty-four ice blocks between 2014 and 2018 only had a negligible impact on Greenland’s ice sheet, research has shown the significant carbon footprint of the installation, mainly due to the transportation of the ice blocks (Heuer 2019: 184), thereby raising the question of the ethics of such environmental art projects.
22Just like Gallaccio’s oaks, Palmer’s trees were commercially grown (Palmer). Seven had fallen after storms and three were chopped down especially for the installation (Such 2010: 36). Unlike Gallaccio, however, Palmer did not explicitly discuss the potential physical and symbolic violence underlying the project of cutting down some of these primary rainforest trees for her art. Rather, for Palmer, the installation would convey a “message to millions of people on the impacts of deforestation,” which would “outweigh the carbon ‘spend’” (“Ghost Forest Take Roots in Oxford” 2010: 4). In addition, the artist decided to partner with the profit-for-purpose company ClimateCare to offset the carbon costs of the installation, contributing to clean cookstove projects (“Ghost Forest Take Roots in Oxford” 2010: 4). Yet for an artist claiming to fight against deforestation, uprooting actual tropical trees remained a fairly paradoxical move. Because of both legal and illegal deforestation, according to specialists, rainforest cover in Ghana has been reduced by more than 90% since the 1940s (Hens and Kwesi Boon 1999: 338; Ogutu 2014). The artistic process here partly – and perhaps also problematically – replicates environmental extractive processes and relies on the logic of carbon offsetting, the strategy of compensating for carbon emissions developed in the 1990s and denounced by some scholars as counter-productive (Ervine 2012; Ervine 2018).
- 22 ‘Each [stump] weigh[ed] at least two tons,’ the largest twenty-two tons (Such 2010: 36).
23The choice, by a (white) British artist, to work with importers of tropical hardwood and select tree stumps from Ghana, a territory formerly part of the British Crown Colony of the Gold Coast, of all places, also invites us to take a closer look at some of the surviving imaginaries of the British Empire and its environmental history in Palmer’s artwork. Ghost Forest was widely advertised as an extraordinary event, to the extent that it presented the public with something which, allegedly, had never been seen before – a forest on the move. The transport of the massive tree stumps22 was described as a real, epic saga, or, in Palmer’s own words, as “a gargantuan task of logistics, rich in adventure and drama” (“Ghost Forest Take Roots in Oxford” 2010: 1). When Ghost Forest was unveiled in Oxford in July 2010, Professor Andrew Hamilton, then Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, made the following quip: “I don’t think there’s a forest that has moved this much since the forest’s move from – in Macbeth – from Birnam Wood to Dunsinane” (3xScreen Media 21:19-21:30). However witty the reference to the moving forest in Macbeth might be, the remark testified to the relatively widespread lack of historical awareness when it comes to imperial environmental history. Plants – and trees in particular – are often thought of as static beings and passive, inanimate objects, a cultural view that is being examined and deconstructed in the field of plant and arboreal humanities. As they are associated to rootedness, plants tend to embody a sense of stability and permanence. Yet plants have moved very often and very far throughout history, and increasingly so with the rise of modern colonial Empires (Watkins 2014; Schiebinger 2004: 3-4; Elliott, Watkins and Daniels 2011). This history of “tree movements” (Watkins 2014) has been a subject of great interest to many contemporary artists, like Keg de Souza (b.1978), an Australian artist of Goan heritage who was artist in residence at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh in 2022. Her exhibition Shipping Roots at Inverleith House (24 March–27 August 2023) explored the imperial stories of the movements of three plants – the eucalyptus, the prickly pear cactus and hitchhiker seeds and burrs – between India, Australia and the United Kingdom (De Souza 2023).
- 23 The adjective “exotic” here is not to be understood solely as a synonym of “foreign,” but, rather, (...)
24The British Empire has been described as an “empire of plants” (Musgrave and Musgrave 2000) and botanists as “agents of empire” (Mackay 2011; Crosby 1986). Victorian botanical gardens, such as the Physic Garden at Chelsea and Princess Augusta’s Garden at Kew were “gardens of empire” (McCracken 1997), which presented visitors with a microcosm of the wonders of the whole Empire and thus encouraged national – and imperial – pride. Arboretums have likewise been described as “windows across the world” (Elliott, Watkins and Daniels 2007: 24). In their cultural history of the nineteenth-century British arboretum, Paul A. Elliott, Charles Watkins and Stephen Daniels have discussed the craze for tree collecting that began in the 1830s with the creation of the first arboretums in Britain. Just “like works of art or antiquities, [trees had become] highly desirable for their own beauties or as a backdrop for parks” (2007: 7). For Victorians and Edwardians, “strolling within an arboretum was a very active experience like a wonderful panorama, an excursion around the globe” (Elliott, Watkins and Daniels 2007: 24), which allowed them to feel like they were “partaking of the triumphs of science, commerce and exploration, conquest and empire” (Elliott, Watkins and Daniels 2007: 24). Furthermore, visitors could fantasise about the so-called pristine nature in British colonial territories, for “[e]xotic species suggested an idyll or a paradise […] in gardens and arboretums” (Payne 2017: 136). Ghost Forest partly relies on the postcolonial survival of this imaginary of sublime, idyllic, pristine natural tropical landscapes to emphasise the need to fight against deforestation. The installation may itself be construed as a dead, fragmented “exotic”23 arboretum of sorts. Seven indigenous Ghanaian tree species were included in the installation – denya, dahuma, danta, hyedua, mahogany and wawa (“In Pictures”). The selection of such remarkable, “exotic” trees, presented as beautiful natural wonders, evokes, more broadly, the imperial gathering practices for botanical collections in British arboretums, gardens, natural history museums and universal exhibitions. One may thus argue that the use of tropical trees is uncanny, familiarly unfamiliar to the British audience, precisely because it echoes this long imperial history of “exotic” tree collecting.
25The display of trees from Ghana in Ghost Forest also conjured up the often-unacknowledged ghosts of the imperial history of forestry, which was one of appropriation and exploitation of natural resources. Historians have studied how colonisers have used “colonial forestry regimes as instruments of imperial authority and resource exploitation” (Ross 2017: 275). Although tropical trees were valued aesthetically, trees were first and foremost commodities, crucial colonial economic resources. The first conservationist environmental policies in Ghana were actually motivated by European interests. As Michael Asante explains, the “priority [of the colonial authorities] was not controlling deforestation but managing lands and forests in order to cater to the needs of Britain” (Asante 2005: 68). In Ghana, where “most of the timber felled was destined for Europe” (Parren and de Graaf 1995: 19) large-scale timber exportation began in the late nineteenth century, when the Gold Coast became a formal colony (Palo and Yirdaw 1996: 349). This increasing exploitation, according to the environmental historians William Beinart and Lotte Hughes, is to be understood as a consequence of the deforestation of Britain and the subsequent lack of domestic timber (2007: 11). According to a report published in 2006 by the coalition of NGOs Forest Watch Ghana, the Ghanaian forest governance “continue[s] largely to be determined by the substructure of exploitative international economic relations that colonialism introduced to Ghana between 1850 and 1950” (2006: 19). Other forestry specialists have highlighted the specificity of the historical forest overexploitation in West Africa, characterised by the intensive harvest of a “limited number of species with diameters mostly surpassing one meter [… and t]he repeated removal of the best individuals of a limited number of species at very short felling cycles” (Parren and Doumbia 2005: 183). Specific remarkable and monumental trees were selected and chopped down, including African mahogany trees (Palo and Mery 1996: 349), one of the seven tree species included in Ghost Forest.
26Although Palmer’s project aimed at drawing attention to the political and cultural change towards more sustainability in Ghanaian forestry policies in the 2000s, the work also echoed past forestry practices, as well as botanical and forestry imperial imaginaries. On the first day of the installation in Trafalgar Square, the environmental scientist Andrew Mitchell, a friend of the artist, described how
[i]n the morning, rain had fallen on the square [and] it was glistening like a mirror and you could see the columns of the great buildings, these great, colonial, massive, powerful buildings that had actually been responsible for cutting down these trees so many years ago, reflected in the light, in the water on the square; and there were these trees on white plinths challenging everybody around there and it was silent. (3xScreen Media: 12:13-12:38)
27The quote brings together three key ingredients for both a literal and metaphorical reflection on Britain’s imperial past: timber, water and colonial power. All three were already present in Gallaccio’s beat at Tate Britain, seven years earlier. Because of their shared connections with collective memories of British imperial environmental history, Ghost Forest may be construed as a public, outdoor reiteration of Gallaccio’s work, a symptom of the obstinate return of the spectres of Empire in British contemporary art.