Sentinels
[Printed images on photopaper. Available individually as postcards or A4, in groups as A3, A2 and A1]
Woody-stemmed plants appeared on earth some 360 million years ago, with the first pines and hardwoods evolving about 150 and 125 million years ago respectively. Our maples and oaks are only 67 and 56 million years old, but this stands in marked contrast to the ~7 million years of human evolution, and a mere 300,000 years for Homo sapiens. Not only is there increasing evidence that through their eons of evolution trees have established sophisticated communication systems, now dubbed the ‘Wood Wide Web’, but we might also imagine that they have kept a careful watch on our own species – and, sadly, we can all too readily conclude that they have been extremely disappointed with our behaviour!
These are some of the more obvious individual trees that stand sentinel to our misdeeds. Hopefully, it will help us enjoy, cherish, and properly honour their gaze.
L’antscrape Art – a symbiotic art practice.
(Formica rufa and Ian Bride, 2020-23)
You probably don’t know this, but we wood ants are ‘keystone species’ and ‘ecosystem engineers’. This means we play a critical role in maintaining the structure of our ecological community. Thus we affect many others organisms, helping determine their types and populations, and directly modulate the availability of resources, such as nutrients, to other species. Just on the University campus alone, we manage substancial areas of woodland, farming aphids in the tree canopy for their excreted honeydew, preying on other insects – some that are forest pests – cleaning up dead creatures, and building large composting, thatched nest mounds that cover a complex of tunnels and chambers penetrating far below ground. We accumulate about 50kg of plant material each year, including seeds of specific plant species, and bring up significant volumes of valuable minerals from below ground. This creates a thermally controlled environment for our brood development and valuable concentrations of nutrients that become available to other organisms, particularly when we move our colony moves on to build another nest and gathered seeds germinate.
Our nests also provide habitat for other species, many having evolved chemical defences or ‘invisibility’. Bear in mind that our behaviour is controlled by chemical signals; with over 70 different ones having been isolated from a single ant by some humans. Our nests support about 100,000 indvidual female workers ruled by one or more queens (male ants only have one real purpose!). But, like your settlements, our nests are often interlinked with others to form vast colonies – one estimated to comprise 400 million individual ants in >2.5 km2..
Anyway, we like to build our nests around pieces of rotting timber so we can remove the soft material to compost and be creative at the same time, usually with the help of the formic acid we can spray to defend ourtselves or deposit at our nest entrances as an ‘anty-biotic’ (ant queens can pun too!). We have given permission for Dr. Bride to carefully remove these after 2-3 years, clean, treat and mount them, so that you humans can appreciate our hard work and how we benefit the environment, as well as better understand the nature, structure and beauty of wood. It is not naturally straight, squared and planed!
So we hope you will appreciate our antscraped art, which we have actually been making for over 15 million years (compared to your efforts for a mere ~100,000 years). Most importanlty however, although we exist in large numbers, you humans have Red-list designated us as ‘near threatened’ because each of our populations depends upon a small number of queens, and you keep interferring with our work. So you need to care about and for us!
Sincerely yours
Queen Formica
CCMMDX of Brotherhood Woods
Dr. Ian Bride (Emeritus Reader, University of Kent): From 1995-2020 Ian worked part-time at the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology, in the University’s School of Anthropology and Conservation. As an interdisciplinary academic/teacher/researcher/practitioner immersed in biodiversity conservation and environmental education, he gained considerable knowledge and experience, including through community-based conservation projects in Mexico, India and Borneo. During this time he also completed a BTec in Art and Design at the University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury, and was an Associate Artist at Open School East, Margate (2018). He is also a qualified cabinet-maker, teacher of traditional woodland crafts, and roundwood timber builder. He took early retirement in 2020 to more fully exercise his creative muscles, primarily exploring human/nature discourses through engaging with objects (natural and human-made), representation, and a wide range of processes. In so doing, he seeks to challenge some of the epistemological frameworks and positionalities that underpin prevailing environmental and conservation narratives, and offer interesting ways of engaging with and understanding them whilst giving a novel ‘voice’ to nature. He is comfortable experimenting with almost any materials and ways of making; and is keen to collaborate with like-minded creatives. Contact: i.g.bride@kent.ac.uk