David More &
John White
Identifying
the entities that constitute 'meatspace' (a disdainful
misnomer for material reality, which, despite itself,
includes non-meaty thingly things) is no longer a celebrated
aspect of common knowledge. Our increasing estrangement
fromnatural phenomena is such that teenagers, reportedly
at least, cannot identify the native veg on their dinner
plates. The art of recognising - the assignment of a thing
to its correct name - is seemingly a dying and archaic
capacity.
This coming
spring will see the publication of an illustrated survey
of British and northern European trees. No book of comparable
scope or visual detail is currently available. Nor is
such an undertaking likely to be repeated. The illustrations
alone have taken 12 years to complete. With over 1,800
species and cultivars represented, no continent has had
its tree-flora so intimately documented. In spirit, the
book belongs to great natural histories produced in the
19th century. Each variety is illustrated with a scaled
representation of trunk and foliage canopy together with
other identificatory details. These include: representations
of the leaf (in both summer, autumn and underside variations);
sections of bark (old and new); and blossom and fruit
(where appropriate). Each variety has a brief description
of its history and growing characteristics (written by
John White). As a book, it falls somewhere between artist's
monograph and definitive resource. At over 800 pages,
it is too big to be a field guide.
David More,
the illustrator, is self-taught. Until recently, he was
unsure if his private obsession would find a publisher.
One question raised by this book, is why illustration
persists as a visual language and whyphotography has not
usurped it? To judge from More's work, one answer lies
within the imbalance that illustration achieves between
the general and particular (the distinction between a
particular Sugar Pine tree and its Sugar Pine-ness). That
is to say, the clarity with which the type, to which a
particular example belongs (the type's token), is articulated.
The indexical relation of the photograph to its object
hinders the articulation of typeness and privileges the
contingencies of the particular. Illustration seeks to
find the opposite relation. One might say that illustration
is a mode of visual dressage by which a thing is presented
for the sole purposes of its recognisability through the
overcoming of its particularity by the dominance of its
typeness.
Each image
in this book is based upon a particular tree, but is depicted
without a surrounding landscape, and is given no citation
to reveal its location. Despite its empirical nature,
it is a private passion (born, in part, out of the death
of the English Elm in the early 1970s). And a number of
mappings are concealed within it. Not least, the artist's
own journey amongst European trees. It is also an archive
of particular trees (however invisible they may be) and
tree varieties, that within time, will no longer exist.
