5 things to know about Among the Trees

It took us all around the world…

…from Colombian rainforests and remote Japanese islands, to the streets of New York City – and presents us with astonishing things. That includes a cast of a 2,000-year-old olive tree from southern Italy, and an ancient underground forest in South Africa photographed by Rachel Sussman as part of her decade-long project to document the world’s oldest living things.

There artworks pushed at the very limits of our building, and celebrated the soaring scale of trees

Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s huge, cinematic portrait of a 30-metre spruce, for example, takes over almost the entirety of one of the lower galleries, while Guiseppe Penone’s Tree of 12 Metres (1980–82), a sapling painstakingly excavated from an industrially planed piece of timber, stops just short of the ceiling. Upstairs, Viriginia Overton has covered one of the gallery walls in vibrantly coloured planks of Eastern red cedar taken from trees that surround her family farm in rural Tennessee.

The artists in this exhibition explored new ways of thinking about our connection to trees and forests…

…and the role they play in our lives and imaginations. Eva Jospin transforms the gallery into an enchanted wood with her towering forest made entirely from cardboard; Mariele Neudecker presents us with an eerily illuminated underwater forest with her sculpture And Then the World Changed Colour: Breathing Yellow (2019); while artists including Sally Mann, Steve McQueen and Jimmie Durham address how entwined trees are with our history, politics and everyday lives.

It spanned the past 50 years

A period that coincides with the emergence of the modern environmental movement. nd includes early works by Robert Smithson, a pioneer of the land art movement, alongside recent artwork by some of the most innovative and inventive artists working today, which ask us to consider the human impact on arboreal life, and our environment more broadly.

At once thought-provoking and therapeutic, this exhibition encouraged us to appreciate the beauty and complexity of trees and forests

And to lose ourselves – momentarily – in artworks that range from Jennifer Steinkamp’s hypnotic video-installation of a birch grove cycling through the seasons, to Toba Khedoori’s intricate, almost hallucinogenic, drawings and paintings of dense networks of branches, roots, and leaves. After months of lockdown, the chance to go tree-bathing in the Hayward Gallery is surely more welcome than ever.

Among the Trees was at Hayward Gallery, 4 March – 31 October 2020.

Header image: Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Horizontal – Vaakasuora, 2011, at Among the Trees, Hayward Gallery, 2020 © Crystal Eye, Helsinki, 2020. Courtesy of Hayward Gallery. Photo: Linda Nylind