Jay Koh (2016), an artist who practices art-led participative process says “Dialogue needs to be supported and integrated within performance in everyday life, where roles are tested, enacted and re-enacted. Even when trees are felled, the wood will regrow here or there, and it will always be present for me to clear away cobwebs or to sit on a branch to reflect. This, combined with the space and the responsive movement, created a beautiful piece of moving image. Though writing Embrace has been highly rewarding, the process has been challenging. Also known as Alnus glutinosa, the black alder is European alder, belonging to the Betulaceae family. Since moving to the suburbs of Aberdeen the scraps of woodland and the path network through it gathered personal significance, at first as a pleasant background to my walks, but gradually as an environment I feel intimately connected to. I shuddered, returned to the wood. Gather at 1 pm at the junction of School Road and Bucklerburn Drive in Peterculter. Tim: The participants were largely preoccupied by their own background and experience. Petra In my brief for the workshop I suggested to investigate my relation to the wood. Dialogue on its own is not the solution. Realising that I only saw the shadow play of branches and twigs because I opened up for it, my eye suddenly fell on my own shadow and I started playing with gestures and compositions. Ash can be difficult to work with, though; the pores must be filled before finishes are applied, and two swamp ash guitar bodies are more likely to differ from one another tonally than two bodies made of alder, which has a tighter, more consistent grain. Did the other large trees also belong to the garden of the house? If anything, Embrace is about my journey of bonding with those woodlands. Eliot’s Four Quartet’s and Alice Oswald’s Dart, I structured the poem as a conversation between the woodlands and my fictional self and broke my argument up into seven movements, each of which featured a particular local tree species. Indeed, the wood and I have entered a relationship. Writing poetry to a brief is challenging – especially when the one poem has to span an hour-long outdoor performance. To mark National Poetry Day, I shall post one of those moments a day for a month. Petra: Most participants were unfamiliar with the woodland where the workshop was held and tried to find out about its history of the wood, Culter House and the well dedicated to St. Bride. It’s very easy to work with and it glues well. The big house (which we never actually saw) was a shadow in the trees at one point. In this video you can see what I came up with. There are two types used to make guitar bodies—northern ash, and southern or “swamp” ash. This place inspires us both, but whereas I express myself in words, Angela uses the language of movement and gesture. Join environmental artists Reiko Goto and Tim Collins to explore issues of empathy, memory and imagination through walking, listening and recording in the woodlands north of Peterculter. Yet, not all of these are at the forefront of my mind. Not only do I enjoy writing poetry, I also like experimenting with the different forms poetry can take. I experienced something like this when I wrote ‘Like birds bodied forward/ stirring up a blur / between trees’ in response to my workshop Round and Round last August. Though writing Embrace turned out to be more challenging than expected, I am keen to write another narrative poem. We have known the Black Wood of Rannoch since the summer of 2012. The performance forms the culmination of the project Woodland Magic, supported by Creative Funding from Aberdeen City Council, in which I collaborated with performance artist Angela Main, photographer David Officer and environmental artists Reiko Goto Collins and Tim Collins to offer three workshops to explore different ways to understand and appreciate everyday natural environments.

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