Annie-Rose Fiddian-Green: Breathing with Trees, Brooke-Walder Gallery, London, 14 June – 14 July 2024
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I’m really interested in how your work collectively tries to capture the ‘ever-changing earth’. I’m curious about how you choose to convey this dynamic aspect of nature through your work?

Fluid, dynamic lines, expressive marks and absolutely no rubbers! Every mark I make is left on the paper as a direct and pure expression of the transience and impermanence of life. Be it a tree, or a portrait, I work to capture something alive, breathing, something aging and borderless. What we see in the flesh is a container for an invisible world, my work explores this place of the unknown. We only get to appreciate a fraction of what is truly going on in nature.

When a drawing is overworked, or not moving in the right direction, I simply have to start again as I don’t like to rub out anything as often as it means l lose a freshness within my swirling drawings. I love the immediacy of the first marks on blank paper. This is often where I can see my own energy coming through.

Breathing with Trees marks your return to drawing in its purest form. What do you enjoy about working with the medium?

It’s simple; pencil and paper are uncomplicated. Life can be complicated so sometimes returning to the rudimentary tools can be liberating. Drawing will always be my home, it’s where my art began as a child and is fundamental to my art journey.

I love the scratchy, hard lines of pencil – the swirling clarity you can get in the marks – but also the soft layered shadows you can create, too. Paper can feel less ‘precious’ than canvas, so often there is space for more expression that is less vulnerable than the first marks I make on canvas. Also, paper and pencils come from trees. So this comments on the natural world’s fragility at the hands of humans. I want to give back to the trees by drawing them and encouraging more love and respect for these ancient beings that do so much for us…

It’s interesting that Surrey plays such a big role in your current work – could you talk about how the area inspired you?

The Surrey Hills are where I grew up. It has been my place of return from work and life abroad and the trees are my home there too. They help me ground and ‘re-root’ after time away in other countries and cultures. Some of the oldest oaks in the UK are found in Surrey. And there are more trees in this county than any other county in the UK with more than 1/5 of its land area covered with trees. So there are lots of models around for me to work from!

Your work focuses a lot on systems of nature like mycelium, spirals, the forms of trees; I’m wondering what drew you to them.

The human form has always been central to my work. But during the first lockdown, I turned my attention from the figure to trees when I moved out of London and was confronted with the isolation from humans and returned to the landscape. The trees twist, spiral and move as the body does and the helical lines I draw are perhaps a reference to this shared recurring form across nature. My fascination with mycelium started during this time as I began to delve into deep research about how trees communicate. Peter Wohllben’s wonderful book The Hidden Life of Trees was formative in my tree explorations and the catalyst behind much of my research.

I have always been interested in energetic fields, ‘life force’ and the concept of the soul and so I try to explore a frameless shapeless way of drawing this whilst balancing a sense of physical presence and bodily weight.

Some pieces – like Whispering Oak and Breathing, Growing, Changing – explore the whimsy of nature. How do you balance the tension between abstraction and representation in your drawings?

I love the word ‘whimsical’! It correlates exactly with the playful child-like way I have always interacted with nature. Climbing trees, running into cold water or collecting wildflowers are examples of the ways nature is playful and this feeling of freedom and connection she gives me is treasure. I think abstraction creates space for this freedom and playfulness, I need room for wild expression within my work, whilst I also need to look out to nature to study form and shape and the natural rhythms that grow through the trees for example. Since I was very young I have always drawn the world around me, with formal training in portraiture and life drawing. I love feeling lost in simply looking and studying something with pencil. Representational art making will always be important to me but I agree that ‘you need to know the rules to break them’ I think Picasso said this, and here with these tree drawings, I am pushing the boundary of what a tree looks like towards what a tree feels like. The wind is key- for she moves the trees and bends their branches, they dance and sway and I hope to capture this dynamism in my work. How do you draw the wind…

In other work, you’ve examined the human body as a rhetorical device. Does this approach inform your current exploration of trees and natural forms?

The way I treat drawing the human form is very much the same as the way I approach drawing trees. Moving, breathing, growing, ageing and dancing – we and trees share all these qualities. Not forgetting the energetic life force that connects us all.

However, my return to studying the trees now to when I began 4 years ago, is perhaps the notion of returning home and what the ancient trees that hold space in the landscape give me. After much time living and working around the world, the trees at home are wonderful friends to return to! They calm and soothe my often overstimulated busy mind. You don’t need to go far to find one in a city park, and it’s proven that the human brain releases dopamine when amongst them.

The ancient oak trees of the UK support over 2000 wildlife species including humans. It’s no surprise that I am drawn to them and will always marvel at their strength and haunting beauty.
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Image credit: Annie-Rose Fiddean Green, Breathing tree, 2024, Pencil on paper.
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Annie-Rose Fiddian-Green lives and works in Surrey, UK. Fiddian-Green completed her BA in Fine Art Painting at City and Guilds of London Art School (2015-2018). She has studied drawing and painting at the Royal Drawing School, the Florence Academy of Art, Edinburgh Atelier of Fine Art and London Fine Art Studios. She has been accepted onto artist residencies Kaaysa Residency in Brazil (2020), Azan Space Lisbon (2021), and most recently to JO-HS Gallery, Mexico City (December 2023).