The Alphabet & Calendar of Trees

My eye was caught by a mention Roland Barthes makes in his autobiography of an ancient Greek ‘alphabet of trees’. I went looking but couldn’t find out more about this marvellous alphabet. Instead the hunt me led to the Ogham alphabet, an early medieval script found on monuments in Ireland and western Britain. Later medieval texts associated each of these letters with a tree: birch, hazel, oak and so on. In the 1940s Robert Graves offered a controversial but influential theory that certain Ogham letters also correspond to the lunar months.

What is it to imagine the letters of the alphabet are tied to living plants and lunar rhythms? What would it be to walk through a forest of words and time? What does it mean to be enchanted by those ideas today?

The Alphabet & Calendar of Trees (2015) interprets 21 letters from the Ogham alphabet. Each collage is made from wood-pattern plastic laid over green A4 printer paper. The collage is floated on paper card, backed with hardboard, placed behind glass, and framed in wood from the abachi tree (Triplochiton scleroxylon) treated to resemble ‘antique oak’.

The Alphabet & Calendar of Trees was exhibited in Overlay, pictured below, at White Rainbow Gallery, London, in 2016. This group show with Hannah Lees, Zoë Paul, Claire Potter and the late Nancy Holt was curated by Jeremy Millar.

Photos: Noah Da Costa.