Welcome to WOOD.LAND., Tyler Moorehead, 2021

Installation Menier Gallery group show ‘Beep Beep, The end of the end of the world’

Portraits and soundscapes from the urban woods pre-imagine a warm, woodland welcome not always extended to those from ethnically diverse backgrounds.

Welcome to WOOD. LAND. aims to gain access to deeper research on the emotional and social connections between ethnicity and nature.

Drawing on forest ritual and oral traditions, Welcome to WOOD.LAND. extends relational practice to sensory activism.

Conversations in nature build our capacity to challenge and re-negotiate ‘urban’ narratives which often do not include green space.

In the woods, we bear witness to our collective experience of disenfranchisement in nature. Walking together, we welcome ourselves, and inhabit the urban woods on new terms.

Enveloped by trees and life, we seek to unravel the notion that black and brown bodies are unnatural in the natural world.

Soundscape:

Natural soprano and bass tones from bird calls, rustllng trees, scrambling squirrels, beats on hollow logs, runners on gravel, dogs in puddles, and planes rumbling overhead.

Field recordings from Highgate Wood and Queens Wood North London.

Spoken word:

Birds, squirrels, woodland sounds and percussion of woodland runners accompany Debi Tinsley's (www.debitinsley.com) vocal performance of a deconstruction of Maya Angelou's epic poem 'When Great Trees Fall'.