Acquisition

I have the great privilege to shadow some excellent practitioners in great settings as part of my Forest School training. One such place is a Bradford primary school where the staff and pupils have been so welcoming (aside from the time I was killed - twice - in a mock execution, but that's for another post).

Today, year one children were in the woods and some asked me to make some sculptures I'd shown them before. It was the sort of thing, pictured below (made in Hirst Woods, Shipley), for which I have to thank the inspiration of Andy Goldsworthy.

All the examples I've shown the children, I've left attached to the tree. I think, partly, because that's how I remember first seeing Goldsworthy's work and partly that I think it works best artistically; "flowing" from the normal growth of the tree. Part of the tree but separated from it, "appended" is probably nearer. I think the work surprises in that at first it appears to grow from the tree but, in the regularity of the stitching, it shows the hand of the artist*. I think the piece works best in the setting in which it is created.

The children, however, nearly always want to remove their work and I've begun to think about why this is the case.

Is it as simple as that this is how they've come to know art produced in school, as being something that is taken home at the end of the day? To be shown to parents or friends?

Or is it something more subtle? A "natural" human acquisitiveness with regard to nature? That nature is a place to be taken from? That nature's resources find their greatest expression when brought into our world?

Is this the acquisitive drive that has led humans to create so much of benefit from nature but at the same time to leave it bereft?

Your thoughts?

*in my own case I use the term very loosely.