Enter the forest

Photographer Ellie Davies’ work explores the fabricated nature of landscape by making a variety of temporary, non-invasive interventions in the forest, placing the viewer in the gap between fantasy and reality. Her small interruptions have involved building structures out of found materials, creating pools of light on the forest floor and introducing starscapes taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Ellie tells us more about her spellbinding images...

Stars 8, and all images below, by Ellie Davies

I LOVE THE RANGE OF RESPONSES MY WORK GETS. Some find it really uplifting, others find it dark and sinister. I think that says more about the viewer than it does about the work. While the images explore my own experiences of the woods – and I have a very positive relationship with woodland – the forest is a place that can bring different levels of unease. You often see this played out in the way forests are portrayed in storytelling and mythology.

I THINK THIS HISTORICAL PORTRAYAL OF WOODLAND IN STORYTELLING came about when communities were living in tiny settlements within predominantly wooded landscapes, and to stray beyond the boundaries was potentially dangerous. Since then, woodlands have become an emotive metaphor for all sorts of other things, relating to the subconscious, and these get woven into stories that can really ignite the imagination.

I GREW UP IN THE NEW FOREST AND SPENT MOST OF MY CHILDHOOD PLAYING IN THE WOODS WITH MY TWIN SISTER. You need that in childhood. I think children’s memories of woodland are so vivid because these experiences are often their very first explorations and adventures, and this plays such an important part in children working out who they are and gaining self confidence.

IN THE NEW FOREST YOU FIND WONDERFULLY MATURE, ANCIENT WOODS FILLED WITH BEECH AND OAK. I get such a different feeling in these woods, compared with being in a pine plantation. This is often the starting point of a series – thinking about the atmosphere a particular area has, the colour palette, the composition of the space, and age and character of the trees.

AFTER MY SON’S BIRTH, I had a period of time where everything felt different. This was probably due to postnatal depression. I wanted to make new work and I missed being out in the woods all day, but I think as a new mum it’s hard to find the headspace to develop ideas, especially to execute them. I realised that I just had to trust in the process and let things take their course. During that year I made Another Green World, and when I look back at those images I think ‘God, what was I doing?’. I kind of love them but they’re not like anything else I’ve made. They’re strange, alien creatures. At the time I was feeling a bit like that about motherhood. Of course I loved my son enormously, but nothing about motherhood was how I expected – it was all just alien. I suppose these things come out in my work and I can’t see it clearly until I look back later.

I LOVE DOING WHAT I DO, ESSENTIALLY GOING TO THE WOODS TO PLAY. My Between the Trees series was the most fun but also the most challenging to make. These images explore the nature and meaning of ‘forest’ by considering the experience of standing alone in the woods: the eerie sensation that time has slowed down, and that the forest and everything within it exists in a different state. I used smoke to fill the space between the trees, but I won’t tell you how I did it. It was a chaotic process and I probably looked very silly while I was doing it.

I’VE ALWAYS WANTED MY WORK TO BE SCULPTURAL AND HANDMADE; to make sure everything in the image was actually there in the woods, albeit temporarily.The Stars series was a departure from that. The idea first came to me when I was riding an escalator out of a London tube station at night – there was a display of lightbulbs in the window reflecting on the glass of the escalator.These amazing little flares of light against the black background looked like a starscape. I started to think about how I could recreate that photographically. I experimented with things like pricking holes in fabric and light shining through, but nothing quite worked. Then I realised that as it was stars I was trying to create, I should work with the real thing. I came across the Hubble Space Telescope images on the NASA website and I asked their permission to use them in my images. While Stars was an interesting departure, I don’t want to overuse Photoshop. I still feel that a big part of my work is the sculptural, handmade element.

FIRES WAS MY PROJECT LAST YEAR. Fire links modern man to the earliest inhabitants of Britain’s forests. With symbolic narratives spanning the human and natural world, it brings together the opposing themes of life and death, creation and destruction, love and loss, nature versus culture, and numerous other meanings we ascribe to it. The small fires present in my images cast the forest in a warm light, holding back the dark, bringing a sense of safety and comfort, temporarily altering it. A man-made fire must be built and lit, tended and fed. Its mere presence implies the existence of people and the human narrative remains despite their absence in the image. The viewer is invited to weave their own experience into the woodland, to sit down, be silent and still, and become a part of it.

I WORK WITH A SMALL CAMERA KIT – a Pentax 645Z, two lenses and a tripod. I can carry everything on my back or on my bike, and I’m free to walk or cycle wherever I want to go. In the past I’ve considered expanding my production – using lighting, assistants and bigger setups but in the end, I just love being on my own in the woods. A lot of it is trying to find that quiet connection – walking slowly, looking for specific places or ideas, or just waiting for inspiration to come.

This is an extract from an interview that originally featured in issue 9 of Ernest Journal. See more of Ellie’s work, including her latest series, Seascapes, at elliedavies.co.uk.

Shooting the Faroe Islands

For issue 9 of Ernest Journal, Canadian photographer Graeme Owsianski travelled to the Faroes – a huddle of 18 islands rising from the North Atlantic, halfway between Norway and Iceland. There he photographed fell runners, foragers, conservationists and guano-covered, storm-battered cliffs

All images by Graeme Owsianski

Graeme, what are your outstanding memories of the Faroe Islands?

I would say the people and their sense of community. This tiny group of islands in the middle of the North Atlantic is a truly harsh environment, yet the close-knit communities endure it all.

My favourite part of the trip was foraging for ingredients and cooking a meal with Gutti Winther. The weather was against us from the start but it didn’t hold us back for a second. It was a day full of sharing stories, and it ended with one of the most memorable meals I’ve ever had. We also went out on a fishing boat, which was a big highlight. The Faroese are so connected to the sea, so I felt it was crucial to view the islands from out on the water and experience this connection.

What were the islands like to photograph, in comparison to other landscapes you’ve shot?

Trying to capture the scale and do it justice was very challenging. There’s not much to reference scale because the surroundings are just so grand – it was definitely tricky to capture just how small you felt among those towering cliffs. Many times I found myself standing on the edge of a 400-metre drop, which is something I hadn’t experienced before.

What's the most challenging landscape you've photographed?

The Galapagos Islands, which I shot for issue 6 of Ernest. Given that it has such a unique and fragile ecosystem, access can be quite limited. I kept wanting to get higher, to get a vantage point to overlook some of the island and sea but wasn’t able to get where I wanted to, unfortunately. That said, a majority of the beauty of the Galapagos is under water so if we direct the term landscape to what’s below the surface it was an absolute joy to explore and photograph. Not without its challenges though, there were quite a number of curious seals and sea lions that wanted to get up close and personal with my camera.

Where do you turn for inspiration?

Everywhere, to be honest! I find inspiration in all places: art, books, nature, movies, story telling, etc. I think if you hit a rut and feel uninspired, then you need to refocus and look somewhere completely new. Often just reading and letting your imagination conjure up ideas and images can spark new inspiration.

But if I had to pick one thing, it would have to be nature. The more you look, you realise everything is connected.

What's in store for you in 2020?

To finish my house that I’m currently building!

As far as photography trips go – my friend has invited to his newly opened eco lodge called Firvale Wilderness Camp, which is in the Great Bear Rainforest. I’m pretty stoked for that – it’s an incredible area in British Columbia and should have some great fishing and wildlife in store. Also, maybe a trip to Nepal? We’ll see.

Tell us about your kit.

My photo kit doesn’t change a whole lot – I shoot on a Canon 5d mark 1V. I’ve got a pretty wide range of lenses: 16-35, 24-70, 70-200, 100-400, and a 24, 50, 100 macro. There’s different tools for different jobs but if I had to limit myself to just one, I’d roll with a 50mm 1.2 prime. I love this lens for everything, from details to portraits and landscape.

I use a Gitzo carbon tripod. I’m not a huge tripod fan – I find it slows me down, but of course they have their uses. I also have Aquatech Imaging water housing – this opens up even more opportunities to photograph different things you otherwise couldn’t.

I don’t really follow gear and ‘the next best thing’ in camera tech. I use what I’ve got until it wears out. My advice on gear is: the best camera is the one you have with you.

What’s the best piece of advice you've ever been given, in regards to photography?

Shoot as much as you can and don’t be afraid to fail. Photography is something you can always continue to learn and grow at – every situation offers its unique challenges and that’s half the fun. But the light is always changing and the creative possibilities are endless.

Graeme grew up on Vancouver Island and calls Ucluelet on the west coast home. An outdoor lifestyle photographer, he also enjoys hiking, surfing, canoeing and fishing in his ‘backyard’. Follow his work on Instagram @graeme_o

You can see the full feature on the Faroe Islands in issue 9 of Ernest Journal, on sale now.

Issue 9

£10.00

Add To Cart

Whistling languages

There are around 70 whistled languages worldwide, all based on spoken tongues and created to communicate across remote terrain. Each one is formed through changes in pitch, either following a tonal structure (where whistles, or syllables, follow the melody of the parent language), or non-tonal (where whistles mimic changes in vowel resonance, while the jump and slide of notes indicate the consonants)

The steep volcanic peaks of La Gomera. Image by Mathias Weil, courtesy of Free Images

Silbo Gomero - the most whistled language in the world

The shrill whistles of the Silbadors echo among the steep volcanic peaks of La Gomera, second smallest of the Canary Islands. The 4,000-word language of Silbo Gomero replaces the principal phonetics of Castilian Spanish with two distinct sounds for the five vowels and four for the consonants. It’s understood by over 20,000 people and can be heard up to two miles away – substantially further than a ruddy good yell. As a wise Silbador once said, “whistling is always easier than walking”.

Kus Dili - the ‘bird language’

In an isolated valley on northern Turkey’s mountainous Black Sea coast, locals shoot the breeze with the chirruping sounds of Kus dili. Used by around 10,000 people in Kusköy (‘the village of birds’), this centuries old language takes standard Turkish syllables and transforms them into piercing whistles that you can hear from over half a mile away. It’s in decline, but since 2014 local authorities have been trying to reverse this by teaching it at primary school level.

The h’mong - whistle of courtship

Deep in the Himalayas exists a whistling language with a twist. Used by the H’mong people to penetrate dense forests, their whistles also feature in the delicate act of courtship. Historically, young boys would saunter through the moonlit streets of neighbouring villages, whistling poems to catch the ears of young girls. Although rare today, this ancient language permits a complex and private code of love that’s far more chivalrous than the unwelcome ‘wit-woo’ of a wolf whistle.

Words: Matt Iredale

This article originally featured in issue 9 of Ernest Journal, on sale now

Issue 9

£10.00

Add To Cart

Becalmed: changing terrors of the Sargasso Sea

Bring to mind ocean journeys, and you might well imagine high seas, rogue waves, ships dashed on rocks – tales of human resilience pitted against a wild and omnipotent ocean. But what of places where the elements relent, leaving boats to flounder in a windless sea?

There is one such place renowned for its disquieting calms – the Sargasso Sea, a shoreless oval of water in the North Atlantic measuring some 2,000 by 700 miles. Bounded by ocean currents on all sides, the water rotates clockwise in an ocean gyre, slowly revolving like the eye of a hurricane. The area has struck terror into the minds of sailors for centuries. It was once known as the Horse Latitudes, after becalmed Spanish ships were forced to throw their horses overboard to save drinking water. Tales of ghost ships abound, their skeleton crews left to starve or go insane while their sails hung listlessly.

Despite its fearsome reputation, this singular place plays a vital role in the wider North Atlantic ecosystem, renowned oceanographer Sylvia Earle calling the Sargasso Sea ‘the golden rain forest of the ocean’. A knotted mass of free-floating sargassum seaweed covers the surface, picked over by crabs, shrimp and curious fish. Young sea turtles shelter in the thick mat of vegetation, and most of the world’s freshwater eels are spawned here.

Sadly, these revolving ocean currents also pull in vast amounts of ocean plastics, which knot together with the sargassum to form so-called windrows: long rafts of free-floating debris. Even more disturbing, below the surface a fog of microplastics is steadily making its way into the marine food chain. The most terrifying ocean journey of all is one of our own making.

The Smog of the Sea chronicles a one-week journey through the remote waters of the Sargasso Sea; thesmogofthesea.com

The strange world of bee etiquette

Treat these complex insects with the respect they require and they will reward you with an abundance of honey. At least, that’s what the superstitions would have you believe…

Image courtesy of freeimages.com

When an otherwise amenable honey bee harpoons you before tumbling to the earth in her death throes, it’s commonly accepted that you must have done something to deserve it. Wasps are vindictive sods, horseflies are stealthy vampires, and hornets are psychopaths jacked up on insect steroids, but most of us have a vague notion that bees are honourable little souls who don’t sting unless offended somehow.

Delve into British and international folk culture, and you soon realise there are an awful lot of ways to offend a bee. My well-thumbed The Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Ireland (Steve Roud, 2003) contains five pages on the subject, opening with the observation that “the key characteristic of bees [...] is that they are very sensitive and censorious creatures. ” They object to bad manners and domestic discord, they like to be introduced to visitors, and there are formal protocols in place for major events, such as weddings and funerals.

If it seems odd to behave so deferentially towards such miniscule creatures, consider that bees have commanded respect for thousands of years. The ancient Egyptians believed bees were formed from the tears of Ra, while on Minoan Crete and in Phrygia they were associated with the great mother goddess. Greek philosophers admired their industry, and Virgil waxed lyrical about their moral character in The Georgics, noting that “beneath the shelter of majestic laws they live”. Germanic warriors likened them to tiny Valkyries who would bring them luck in battle, while Arabic writers in the 11th and 12th centuries valued their fastidious and loyal nature.

Bee respectful

Rulers throughout the ages have often felt kinship with the regal bee, and in some Norse, Celtic and Saxon cultures, honey or mead was considered valuable enough to be presented as royal tribute. The 5th-century Frankish king Childeric I was buried in a ceremonial cloak studded with 300 golden bees, and Napoleon adopted the same motif for his coronation robe. The 17th-century English apiarist William Butler sawbee society as a model for the perfect ‘Amazonian’ commonwealth, gushing that “they work for all, they watch for all, they fight for all [...] and all this under the government of one Monarch. ”

Humans have kept bees for millennia, and perhaps the abundance of bee-related etiquette is an attempt to understand the seemingly irrational intricacies of insect behaviour in our own terms. If your bees abandon their hive, it’s not really because you forgot to introduce a house guest. If they sting you, it’s not retaliation for a careless obscenity, and if they die off inexplicably, they haven’t done it out of spite because you didn’t bring them a bit of your communion wafer one Sunday. Bees swarm, sting or perish based on complicated environmental and internal factors that make little sense to all but the most knowledgeable entomologists. Much easier to think of a bee as a sort of kamikaze Jiminy Cricket, who will lay down her life without hesitation just to teach you a thing or two about good conduct.

Putting hives in mourning

One of the most complicated portions of beehive etiquette concerns inheriting a colony of bees. Bees must be officially informed of the death of their previous owner, and must be formally put in mourning. Often the new owners are required to make a speech introducing themselves, and to present the bees with offerings of food. Flaunt these rules, and the bees are apt to leave the hives and follow their former master into the afterlife.

Writing in the 1890s, a country parson called J. C. Atkinson recounted one such episode from his boyhood in Essex, when the local rector died and the whole family trooped out to the beehives with “weird solemnity”. Each hive was bound with a strip of black ribbon, then tapped three times with the house key and informed that the master was dead. This sort of practice was once widespread, both in the UK and further afield. France and Switzerland had parallel traditions, and there was a rather fine variant from Guernsey, where it was an encouraging sign if the bees answered with a buzz when you knocked on the hive.

Ever-sensitive to change, bees also demanded certain formalities on wedding days. In Lancashire,
a simple marriage announcement to the bees would suffice, while in Brittany, newlyweds had to festoon the hives with red ribbon. In some areas of Croatia, meanwhile, a bride’s first job on entering her new home was to dab honey on the door lintels as a gesture of friendliness towards her new insect comrades.

Sacred rituals

A 13th-century Welsh legal document called the Gwentian Code claims grandly that “The origin of bees is from Paradise and because of the sin of man they came thence, and God conferred His grace on them”.

As you might expect for creatures straight out of Eden, bees are especially hot on matters of religious observance, and they will soon abandon an owner who isn’t devout enough. Various British and European traditions over the years advised giving the bees a consecrated communion wafer every now and again, and more imaginative beekeepers would sometimes recount opening up the hive to find their bees reverently building ornate wax altars on which to place the sacred host.

Significant occasions in the church calendar often merited more elaborate offerings. In some parts of Germany, bees were provided with a special meal on Maundy Thursday or Good Friday, and were treated to a sprinkling of holy water and a waft of incense on Epiphany and Christmas Eve. In northern England, the bees seem to have participated more exuberantly during the festive season. As early as 1794, the lawyer and historian William Hutchinson recorded that Cumbrian bees in Bootle were “heard to sing” on Christmas Eve, while William Henderson’s Notes on the Folk-lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders (1879) mentions Northumbrian bees assembling promptly at midnight to “hum a Christmas hymn”.

Bad behaviour

“It is a very general belief,” writes Hilda Ransome in The Sacred Bee in Ancient Times and Folklore (1937), “that you must not swear at bees. They will either die or sting those who use bad language”.

Bees expect the highest levels of conduct from their owners. They will not stay in a quarrelsome home, nor will they tolerate avarice or promiscuity, often going on strike in protest. In his early beekeeping volume, The Feminine Monarchie (1609), Charles Butler advises that “thou must not be unchaste and uncleanly; for inpuritie and sluttishness [...] they utterly abhor”. Bees are especially attuned to ‘inpuritie’, and there are stories of canny country girls walking their boyfriends past the beehives, knowing that bees will attack a cheater.

Bees value scrupulous fairness and generosity in their owners. They appreciate morsels from your table on special occasions, and there’s an old British custom that when you harvest the honey from your hive, you’re supposed to give some to your neighbours, since the bees have undoubtedly plundered nectar from their flowers.

Even many modern apiarists are convinced that bees pick up on the characteristics of their human companions. My mother boasts about how tidy her honey bees keep their hive, while an acquaintance attributes his ‘chilled out’ bees to his own even temper. To my delight, I was once informed at a village fair that bees from my native Yorkshire are hardier and more industrious than the slothful Italian bees imported by some rookie beekeepers.

Acquiring bees

Another of the most common bee superstitions is that they don’t like to be bought or sold like domestic animals. In some parts of the UK you can trade bees for gold or barter them for chickens or whatever, but buying a colony for actual money is a big no-no. One Victorian source from the Dartmoor area suggests half a sack of wheat as a reasonable trade, urging that “bees must not be bought, [for] they would thrive as ill as if they were stolen. ” It goes without saying, of course, that no good can come of stealing bees, and they will usually express their outrage by dying en masse.

The best way to acquire bees is to inherit them, or even better, to have a swarm deliberately decide to take up residence with you. The sight of a swarm without a home has always been an exciting prospect for a beekeeper, and there are all kinds of elaborate charms for encouraging passing clouds of bees to stay. In Roman times, people attempted to attract itinerant swarms with bells and tiny cymbals, believing that they found the sound appealing. Somehow, this refined practice evolved into the rather rowdier British custom of ‘tanging’ bees, in which villagers chased a swarm down the street banging pots and pans. It’s not clear whether this was to announce the presence of the swarm, to attract it, or to lay claim to it, but whatever the case, it must have been fun.

Words: Joly Braime

This article originally featured in issue 8 of Ernest Journal, on sale now

Issue 8

£10.00

Add To Cart