Ghost Forest

Ghost Forest, an installation by Alison Palmer, outside the Natural History Museum in Oxford, uses dead trees to emphasise the fact that a tropical forest the size of a football pitch disappears every 4 seconds. The artist showed extraordinary tenacity in sourcing and transporting these huge trunks and they speak more eloquently than any amount of facts and figures.

This exhibition was also shown in London in 2009, see below, and now remains in Oxford until summer 2011.

This all reminded me of Paul Nash's photograph of a dead elm taken in what he called the Monster Field. Nash describes exactly how this stricken tree makes him feel in `Outline - an autobiography and other writings'. A copy of this book was found for me in David's - the most wonderful bookshop in Cambridge.

It includes a few very striking pictures of Nash himself.