TT Journal, ISSUE 7, September 2024

By Tereza Stehlíková

Nameless Wood, 2011 is a filmic study of Wistman’s Wood, a unique ancient forest in Dartmoor.

Wistman’s Wood presents unique challenges and opportunities for a film-maker. What determined your approach to the project?

My interest in Wistman’s Wood was triggered firstly by the last chapter of John Fowles book The Tree. In it Fowles describes the wood, one of the last remaining patches of ancient woodland in Britain, in terms of its simultaneous existence within various temporal dimensions, some of which are so vast (due to its ancient age) that our human life cannot comprehend them: “a drama, but of a time-span humanity cannot conceive. A pastness, a presentness, a skill with the tenses the writer in me knows he will never know…”

Since much of my work is about exploring, capturing and communicating memory in the medium of video, it seemed to make sense to go to a place that is literally shaped by centuries.

One of my main artistic challenges or preoccupations is to access and express the interior, invisible, through the external. As the great psychotherapist C. G. Jung states: “There is nothing without spirit, for spirit seems to be the inside of things. Dionysus is concerned with the outside of things, with tangible forms, with everything that is made of earth, but inside is the spirit, which is the soul of objects. Whether this is our own psyche or the psyche of the universe we don’t know, but if one touches the earth one cannot avoid the spirit.” In line with this conception I believe that it is in fact by closely studying the physical, purely material, that I can in a sense get beyond the surface, and to some extent uncover the interior world of objects, trees, or rocks.

My way of looking (or filming) as well as structuring the journey into the interior, is of course informed by my investigation of the tactile sense, and in this particular exercise I attempted to alter the viewer’s relationship with the forest, so that one was no longer looking from an external point of view, but in fact from within.

How did you engage with the issues of scale the site presents?

The idea of scale is crucial, most obviously because the trees in Wistman’s Wood are all stunted oaks, only about four meters high. There is therefore an immediate sense of this forest being something miniature, but this feature, rather than diminishing the experience, seems to heighten it, because it takes one into childhood and space of the imagination, where things can be expanded and shrunken according to one’s desires, and it is the miniature rather than the vast, that has the ability to draw one into its depth, one’s own depth. Other scales one can speak of are temporal scales, as the forest seems to exist on both the micro scale of most minute movement connected with the most ephemeral aspects of existence, while also holding the stillness of slow moving centuries, as previously mentioned in the Fowles quote.

In terms of practically engaging with scale, I have used a macro lens to shoot the footage, which allowed me to more or less discard an external perspective (so closely linked to sight), and approach the forest through the dispersed point of view of deep proximity, which is an approach much more akin to touch, and which, as mentioned earlier, helped to erase the division between the subject and object, the inner and the outer.

Were any expectations you had for the place confirmed / altered by the actual encounter?

What struck me most strongly when I encountered the wood was that it was both less and more powerful than I visualised it. In my imagination it was to be much bigger and denser, more forest like. When I first encountered it, it felt slightly incomplete, as if it were a dream posing for reality, full of “holes” that were ready to give the illusion of reality away at any moment. Yet the longer I stayed there, the more my understanding of this particular impression altered: It was not in spite of, but precisely because of this incompleteness that the wood’s power and weight grew on me, as it gained the very vividness of the most acute dreams. The place was no longer pretending to be real, it crossed into a realm of hyper-reality, or perhaps surreality, so that finally a square meter of this wood seemed to contain an almost infinite depth of possibilities and expressions.

The above excerpt comes from an interview for Fourth Door Review with Oliver Lowenstein.

You can watch Nameless Wood, originally made for Just Under the Surface site-specific video installation, Crypt Gallery, London, 2011, here:

Tereza Stehlikova is a Czech/British artist and educator. Her practice spans moving image, participatory performance and is driven by cross-disciplinary collaboration. She is engaged in artistic research, focused on investigating the role that our senses and embodiment play in conveying meaning through artistic practice. In 2020 she launched an online arts journal/platform Tangible Territory, featuring essays and articles by established artists/authors from the world of arts, science, philosophy, all centred around the role our senses play in creating meaning in art and life. She is currently in the process of writing a book called In Exile from our Bodies: How to come back to our senses (Routledge). https://cinestheticfeasts.com/