LAST year, to coincide with the Wye River Festival’s theme of Woods and Trees, Monmouth Museum hosted a small taster exhibition of the work made by a group of artists, The Arborealists, that featured some studies and preliminary works that they had made in Lady Park Wood, in the Wye Valley.

Now, the full exhibition – featuring further works the group produced from their time in the woods – has come to fruition and is now open in Monmouth Museum, where it can be seen for free until July 2020.

What makes Lady Park Wood different from other Wye Valley woodlands is that it has been preserved for 75 years as completely unmanaged woodland. It was set aside in 1944 to study how natural woodlands develop.

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Every so often, their progress towards towering stands of great trees is set back by natural disturbances – like elm disease in 1971 or the great drought of 1976 – in a constant game of snakes and ladders.

As trees get larger and older they become less stable, so many have toppled, creating great gaps in the canopy and piling up dead wood to levels comparable with primaeval forests.

In 2016, George Peterken - forester, ecologist and author - invited The Arborealists to interpret Lady Park Wood from an artist’s perspective – the group’s first site-specific project.

A film was made while they were working there which documents their ideas and reactions, and the exhibition shows the results, by turn dramatic and contemplative, expressive, abstracted, hyperreal and surreal. They demonstrate that trees still have a strong relevance in contemporary art.

The Arborealists, founded in 2013 by Tim Craven, are a loose association of 60 professional artists who share the subject of the tree.

Although united by their subject, they employ a wide range of working practices in scale, medium, philosophy, style and technique. Most of the work in the exhibition is also for sale, and will be refreshed in December.