'Write off the Map'

Gough's work was selected by curator Amy Cutler a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow and post-doctoral research fellow in geography at Royal Holloway University, UK. The field of research addressed through this exhibition examined the link between the French horticultural term "forest trauma" and Robert Pogue Harrison's "forests of nostalgia". It addressed a whole discipline around history, witnessing, and the memorial qualities of woodland. Curated art works examined the cultural expression of time and history in the forest; they were situated alongside archival photographs, small press texts, artefacts, and museum objects, in an old, low-lit belfry designed by Sir John Soane. Paul Gough's Upas Tree drawings take inspiration from Paul Nash's wartime paintings, which link corpses to shattered or blasted trees, but also from the enigmatic fable of the dreaded Upas Tree, based in turn on the tale of the poisonous anchar tree, first revealed by 18th century botanist Erasmus Darwin. The French term "forest trauma", used for post-war ecological devastation, is echoed by the linking of man and tree in the commonly used phrase 'veteran tree'.