The People's Forest (2018)

Chong Kwan’s art consciously cultivates offshoots. From a central premise or framework, her pieces evolve through the participation of the people she encounters in her research and on her travels....A celebration of the diversity of personal stories, and of common roots, the work also mourns other houses (and communities) that have been lost, as the capital city expands and as roads and other major developments clear away what was there before.

Steven Bode

Director, Film and Video Umbrella, UK

Once a Royal Forest, a place where the upper classes could hunt deer and the lower classes could collect firewood, Epping Forest on the London-Essex border has for hundreds of years been an arena of labour and leisure. The British artist Gayle Chong Kwan has spent the past two years researching the stories that are nestled amongst the historical undergrowth of London’s biggest woodland, as it is increasingly engulfed by the growing city. Chong Kwan’s current exhibition The People’s Forest at the William Morris Gallery involves photography and collage after investigating the multiple values of the woodland. Commissioned by the William Morris Gallery and the Barbican, she engaged with the forest as a contested site of historical and recent protest and conflict between capital and common. Echoing the exhibition, Chong Kwan created a totemic tree-like sculpture that stood in the Barbican’s foyer, named The Fairlop Oak after a tree that once stood at the site of a popular eighteenth century fair in the Hainault Forest (near to Epping Forest) that brought large numbers of people to the area. Her research uproots the many protests to save the woodland dating back to the mid-nineteenth century and reflects on the area as a place of liminality, the threshold between the fast-paced metropolitan and the sanctuary of the countryside. As the city and gentrification encroaches further out, the forest becomes even more torn as either a site for monetary potential or as a space for nostalgic escapism.

'Gayle Chong Kwan: The People's Forest' by Charlotte de Santos, Contemporary Art Society

The natural tendency of a tree is to generate offshoots. It puts out feelers in the form of branches; and sends out seeds to create new plantings. A tree may be permanently rooted in one spot, but it never stands still. It is the living epitome of a will to grow – it proliferates, and it multiplies. A tree can also be a marker of how a community grows around it: an index of how much things can change over the course of a lifetime (even a decade) and also a symbol of continuity going back through the generations. One such tree was the so-called Fairlop Oak, a particularly impressive, imposing specimen that towered over a vast clearing at the edge of Hainault Forest in East London. In its shadow, and under its canopy, an annual fair took place, which grew in size and popularity throughout the eighteenth century, eventually attracting crowds of 200,000 people. Although the original oak no longer stands (it was fatally damaged by storm and fire a century and a half ago), the fair that took its name, and its inspiration, from it quickly took its place as an equally prominent beacon in the local landscape. The Fairlop Oak is the name of a new artwork by Gayle Chong Kwan that is also the linchpin of a wider project of hers called The People’s Forest. Evoking the form of a pollarded tree, Chong Kwan’s informal sculptural structure has a playful, totemic character. At the end of each branch is a thin, delicate tendril – sprouting from each stem like ribbons on a maypole. And at the end of each of these is a tiny model of a rudimentary ‘house’. Bursting forth like haphazard fruit, they hang in the air like lanterns, or bits of bunting, or baubles of mistletoe. Their presence alludes to the significance of the forest as a place of shelter and a site of early human habitation but also, perhaps, to its annual harvest of timber as a shared, renewable resource. Chong Kwan’s art consciously cultivates offshoots. From a central premise or framework, her pieces evolve through the participation of the people she encounters in her research and on her travels: the multiple bird box-size ‘houses’ that decorate her homage to the memory of the Fairlop Oak have all been fabricated by various individuals that she met along the way. Made from waste materials found lying around the borough, each one is a rough approximation of the homes that each participant currently inhabits. A celebration of the diversity of personal stories, and of common roots, the work also mourns other houses (and communities) that have been lost, as the capital city expands and as roads and other major developments clear away what was there before. The version of The Fairlop Oak that Chong Kwan is showing at the Barbican is itself an outgrowth of an earlier manifestation that was staged at the Walthamstow Garden Party in July 2017. Reflecting on the two-way traffic between inner and outer London that events like the Fairlop Fair would have instigated, the work deftly links different localities and histories – gathered together under one roof as if under the big top of the branches of a spreading greenwood tree.

'Gayle Chong Kwan: The Fairlop Oak' by Steven Bode, Director, Film and Video Umbrella

At the Barbican, back in November last year, coming through the foyer from the car park to the café, and then again later hurrying to the concert hall to catch a performance by Pharaoh Sanders, I twice caught sight of what seemed to be a temporary structure propping up the ceiling. There was little time to investigate, but curiously it appeared to continue up through the floor above. I didn’t give it much thought. I was intent on a tribute concert for Alice and John Coltrane and an evening of Cosmic Jazz.But now I keep seeing mention online of The People’s Forest and The Fairlop Oak and I realise that I should have been paying more attention. The Fairlop Oak is the title of a sculpture by Gayle Chong Kwan, named after a celebrated tree that stood for many years as the symbol of its local community in east London. A wooden structure, modelled on the shape of an ancient pollard, containing branches gathered in Epping Forest and hung with little paper houses, stands on top of a tall wooden scaffold that extends through two storeys of the Barbican Centre and into the atrium above. And now I’m beginning to think I should go back for a closer look.

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