A dream from the seed's wings

 

Treasuring Trees: celebrating Derbyshire's Trees

Buxton Museum and Art Gallery•

19th february - 8th june 2022 

 

Birch tree,

Will you gift me a dream,

From the seed’s wings,

...From the mere’s mirror?

Three of us have worked together to gather this exhibition. While Sarah and Valerie are visual artist creating paintings, drawings and photographs, I’m a storyteller, a puppeteer and a poet as much as anything else so inspiration for me shapes itself into characters and words 

 

Birch Boggarts waiting for hair...

I like birch trees: their dusty elegance, their endurance, the simple moonlit beauty of their bark all intrigue me. There are stories bound up with birch trees.In the Highlands of Scotland, birch woods are haunted by “The One With the White Hand” who drifts through the trees like mist. If she (?possibly? people don’t usually enter close conversation to get a real sense of gender!) sees you, she may pursue you….If she catches you, a touch from one of her long slender fingers on your forehead will inspire you, make a bard of you. If that finger taps your heart….you will die

 

Birch trees for me went in a lumpier direction and I found birch boggarts waiting to speak… A set of birch tree boggart puppets are taking shape for Treasuring Trees. With them came words, a set of late night, just before sleep, snippets whispered into my drowsy mind by the boggarts that live among the birch roots. These are pages from the Birch Boggarts’ Spellbook. 

 

A time ago, a while ago, the life of a birch ago, a birch wood was being felled and the boggarts of that wood knew they would die with their trees, so they gifted their Spellbook to a human, giving him permission to share its pages.

 

In the Birch Box at Treasuring Trees some of those pages will accompany “my” Birch Root Boggarts….I have been enjoying these lines: they hold mix of danger and beauty that marks most encounters with the peoples of Faerie:  

Birch is the breath

Of inspiration through the wood 

(from: “To be sung when brewing birch-bud tea”)

 
And then:

Our curse lies in a cold wind

And a shadow behind the door.

At some point during the exhibition, all the available pages of the Spellbook will be posted on this blog as a booklet to download for anyone who needs a bit of Birch Leaf Wine in words

 

 

 

*19^th February – 8^th June 2022 at Buxton Museum and Art Gallery. Entrance is free so please feel inspired to buy some postcards or a print in the shop!

 

 

Treasuring Trees: celebrating Derbyshire's trees 

find out more: Treasuring Trees