‘Year of tilting’: Gleaning the Leaning Xylarium

‘Time, The Deer is in the Wood of Hallaig’, insightfully curated by Amy Cutler, juxtaposes fine art with archival photography, rare poetic tree texts and specimens of dendrochronology, ‘the science of arranging events in the order of time by the comparative study of the annual growth rings in timber’. Leaning on stands, easels, bureaus, and against walls, these arboreal artefacts form a Natalie Joelle holds an AHRC doctoral scholarship in the Department of English and Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London, where she is working on an interdisciplinary study of gleaning. She read English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, followed by an MA in Cultural and Critical Studies at Birkbeck and art historical research at Madingley Hall, Cambridge. Her research explores gleaning both as a practice involving bodily leaning while gathering lean pickings left after harvest and as a metaphor for gathering facts and information.

The girls a wood of birch trees Standing tall, with their heads bowed. Sorley MacLean trans. by Seamus Heaney 1 'Time, The Deer is in the Wood of Hallaig', insightfully curated by Amy Cutler, juxtaposes fine art with archival photography, rare poetic tree texts and specimens of dendrochronology, 'the science of arranging events in the order of time by the comparative study of the annual growth rings in timber'. 2 Leaning on stands, easels, bureaus, and against walls, these arboreal artefacts form a 2 wondrous xylarium, or wood collection, which explores cultural expressions of time and memory in the forest. Installed beneath the now-digitally-automated chimes of the beautiful belfry at St John on Bethnal Green, designed by Sir John Soane, the exhibition measures time through two forms of ring: audible and dendrochronological. Tree growth rings can be seen in massy core samples. The tree rings promise an index of seasons that exists uneasily under the rush of clock time. Yet historical scars in the face of the slanted oak section, set at five past, seem to anticipate the shock of the bell's interruption on the hour (  Cutler's curatorial approach stimulatingly tilts the resonances of the dendrochronological slice several ways: tree rings are also suggested lexically in Relics by Richard Skelton and Autumn Richardson. Concentric circles of text chart linguistic change in the names of lost tree genera (Figure 3). 4 The grooves of type that document phonological change are reminiscent of the gramophone record: the etymological memory ascribed to each tree recalls an obsolescent technology. The notion of the tree as a recording technology is explored punningly in OOOMS's designer memory sticks. Part USB, part polished wood, the devices become a group of memory stick figures, placed in a playful anthropomorphic series ( Figure 4). 5 While much of the exhibit's archive of wooden artefacts is positioned on easels and bookstands to lean back as if in partial resistance from us, these figural pieces of wood wittily seem available to evoke an archival backup of us. The wooden backup of memory is, to adopt a neologism from Peter Larkin's arborescent Rings Resting the Circuit, often a 'back-clusion': a word that does not resolve into inclusion or occlusion. 6 The externalisation of memory, a backing up, however inclusive, to the spinney, is perhaps complicit with the occlusion of internal memory, such as the memory of the spine. Memory logged in the forest generates its own backlog of occlusions: no log without obstruction or block. Indeed, rather than a celebration of woodland as sites of reliable logs of our memories, or of firmly rooted recollections, the exhibition often investigates the vulnerability of forest memory to blazes or improper felling.
The accident of remembrance is performed curatorially by a caption that at first appears to be missing its object. In fact, it documents the remaining wooden slats of St John on Bethnal Green following a late-nineteenth-century fire. Cutler lends light to the wood we otherwise would not see for 'her' trees: the walls become an exhibit in their own right ( Figure 5). 7  Carlea Holl-Jensen's The Hollow is a handmade book that conceals part of its narrative between uncut bolts and folded quires. The work is unavailable for reading unless dissected, just as the age of a tree becomes legible only when felled. 'The trees are just as tall as I remember, and they all seem to be leaning down to peer over my shoulder', the text begins. 8 The figure of leaning suggests the modern train passenger's space-encroaching reading of another's news; the attempt to access words at a remove. The Hollow's attempted readers share this sense of trespass.
Trespass is also part of the aesthetic of the exhibition. In the low-lit space, a canopy of tree-pieces lean down over visitors' shoulders as much as we lean inquisitively towards them. No forest clearing offers an unobstructed view, nor are there more landscaped prospects that offer the spectator scope to scrutinize without themselves seeming to come under scrutiny. Like The Hollow, the form of the exhibition stimulatingly performs the opacity and density of its forest subject. Cutler trusts the viewer to meet the challenge of concealment with commitment: to incline themselves as required by the tight space in order to cut their own path. The risk is that dim conditions and the pressure of proximity diminish some small press works. The interesting ambiguity of whether the reading stand or table display placement of works alongside The Hollow do in fact invite opening to read is also the logistical complication that these texts may be subject to either too brief a view or mishandled.
The inclusion of several works that explore Epping Forest, a concession in the decline of common land from which firewood could be gathered, encourages the viewer to reflect on the extent of public access to forest memory. 9 Use of paper luggage tags as the medium for the labels reminds visitors that the collection items are somebody else's property in transit: particularly as Cutler occasionally allows her text to compete with former catalogue descriptions. The artefacts seem evacuated, displaced from their origins. Lightly attached, the tags neither impose coherence, force agreement, nor completely immerse the pieces in the space. Rather than allowing the belfry to hold the artefacts in common, the luggage tags, often leaning on their pieces, hold something back. Cutler's own chapbook Nostalgia Forests (2013) collages diagrams from dendrochonology manuals with text from Paul Ricoeur's Memory, History, Forgetting to suggest the leaning of trees as an abstraction of the affective experience of paradox. 10 A figure that documents a tree's 'year of tilting' is juxtaposed with Ricoeur's words 'we have been forced to agree that that which is | not in a way is' (Figure 6). 11 The 'year of tilting' is buckling under forced agreement, an arboreal contusion that traces the excess between 'is' and 'not'; or it is resistance to forced agreement, a tilt away from the discipline of this logic. For Cutler, the dendrochronological tilt is a cartography of cognition: a mental mapping of neurological dendrites in the experience of a 'difficulty' that hounds us, that leaves us stumped.
The tilt of Cutler's xylarium spatialises the tension of the act of collection in time: an arboreal archive without aspiring to permanence but, in the words of Beckett's recollector Molloy, of 'leaning things, forever lapsing and crumbling away'. 12 Tilt is also acoustic: Will Montgomery's enquiry into the 'sounding potential of trees', in collaboration with Carol Watts, makes tree tilt audible in low, resonant creaks. 13 The untied cords of the labels, leaning upon their artefacts, remain open to other re-cordings, to other patterns of tree recording. Future installations of the current collection could productively continue to explore the form of the arboreal exhibition with the addition of judicious defoliation and dells; of spaces to support individual pieces that could otherwise be compromised by the overarching aesthetic of a woodland space slanted by shadows. Critical questions about the potential ecological or difficulties of forest memories, such as anthropocentricism or externalisation, would also be a welcome addition to the strong curatorial material on this excellent collection. The fascination of these tilting trees demands scope to branch out into new locations.