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Descriptions and
Sketches of Some Remarkable Oaks
Jacob Cartwright, Nick
Jordan and Stephen McNeilly
Single screen DVD, 16:40 mins, 2007
A
collaborative film which depicts three protagonists, the artists themselves,
climbing, measuring, photographing and documenting some aged or dead
oak trees, revealed in birch-coppiced clearings of Sherwood Forest.
The soundtrack uses three mechanical voices, each with a different
pitch, reading William Cowper’s epic unfinished poem Yardley
Oak, written in 1791. Cowper presents the twisted and ancient
oak as a totemic monument to a shared English identity, through which
the inevitability of time's dissolution and decay is brought home
to roost.
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