Stewart Taylor | The Tree Portraits

Printmaker Stewart Taylor is continuing to march onwards with his Tree Portraits series, which he started over 3 years ago in London, prior to him leaving for Devon in late 2020. Initially inspired by the street trees of the city (he rendered over 100 of these in the space of 6 months in his surrounding neighborhood.), these moved outwards to the parks and the wilds beyond, quickly becoming a conversation about our lack of connectivity with the natural world.

“It was a set of circumstances that just worked itself out. I’d recently left East London Printmakers as a keyholder and had been experimenting for a year or so with gelliplates – I essentially had a tabletop set-up at home with no press – around imagery inspired by the rewilding project at Knepp, which I first visited in 2018, and various ecological issues and keystone species. Then one day in January Newham council pollarded the Lime Trees on our street and I monoprinted the one directly outside the flat…I was instantly hooked.”

The visits to Knepp became multiple, including rewilding workshops, and inspired the purchase of an old market gardening plot just outside Dartmouth, and ultimately the move from London. Over a four-year period over 10 tons of human/greenhouse detritus was cleared, and the land is now being reclaimed by natural processes.

“It’s been an enormous part of the inspiration and sustenance for this series, and its direction to try and inspire and make a genuine difference as to how we connect with nature and try an enable it to heal our environment.”

Over 300 prints later the series has spanned commissions and off-shoots on trees affected by disease and wildfire in the USA. Stewart is engaged with ongoing collaborations with other artists and photographers, and has raised over £1000 through print giveaways for both Rewilding Britain and The Woodland Trust.

Prints from this series have been in the last 3 editions of the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair, and have also been selected for the prestigious 2022 Graphica Creativa Triennale in Finland (where the Jyväskyla Art Museum purchased the piece for their collection). Further charity print giveaways are planned in 2023.

“It’s been a truly immersive project thus far, and has taken on a life of its own. The possibilities seem endless. Working with other creatives and giving the prints a more global context breathes further life into the series, and hopefully in the case of the charity giveaways it has a positive impact on restoration work elsewhere.”

@stewarttaylorprints
www.stewarttaylorprints.com

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