Margate Rocks 08 :: Rebecca Birch

Rebecca Birch

Rebecca Birch’s work explores the complex relationships between community and landscapes, and their particular languages, rituals and social patterns. There is particular focus upon the political issues around land ownership and in the interface between domestic and geological timescales, for example, people whose homes are falling into the sea and communities who live alongside ancient woods. The latter is the crux for Bristlecone, Birch’s work being shown at Margate Rocks 08.

Bristlecone is a fifty minute narrative film shot on location in Big Pine, California, the closet settlement to the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, where the oldest trees in the world cling to the high slopes of the White Mountains. The film charts Birch’s journey around the town, in an attempt to discover whether living alongside such ancient, slow growing trees affects the pace that one lives one’s life.

The oldest of the Ancient Bristlecone Pine trees are over 5,000 years old. Their longevity is due in part to the harsh environment they grow in, owing to extremes of temperature and precipitation their annual growing season can be as short as one month. The trees grow and die slowly, and even once finally dead their trunks remain upright – slowly eroding in wind.

The film never actually shows the trees, instead the artist chose to capture their complexity through the verbal description given by the townsfolk. Each conversation in the film was recorded unrehearsed and informally. The subjects of their conversations link descriptions of the trees to a more general discussion of their landscape, covering local mythology (giants living in the forest), spirituality, biology of the trees, the discovery and exploitation of the trees and the issues around the Forest Service’s approach to the management of the landscape, and the contested access rights of the local people to the forest.

The pace of the film is gentle, giving time and space to absorb the conversations and information about the trees. It is exhibited inside a wooden shack that is based upon the workshop/dwelling of one of the people in the film, which gives a further sense of intimacy and sensitivity to the subjects and their ancient landscape.

Each of Rebecca Birch’s projects develops through a fieldwork approach, gathering video, drawing and recorded conversations on location. This emphasis upon conversation is developing in a ‘vernacular of landscape’ – how a particular landscape is constructed and retold through the voices of the people who live and work within it. Birch’s current projects include and attempt to survey all of the activity that takes plance upon a single mountain and Inuvik – an attempt to capture the landscape of the Arctic circle, without seeing it, having travelled to the north during the dark winter months.